Going the extra mile | Secondary projects in Sri Lanka

The project brief told me I would be involved in EDP: an English Development Programme. But that wasn’t half of it. We spent the days alternating between four schools teaching English in the classroom, but what I really want to talk about are the secondary projects that started and grew as we were there – in particular, the sports we organised after school.

I remember the day where it all took off, the moment when everything began. Three boys – Kalpa, Ushan and Ramish – all older boys at the top of the school – visited Finn, my partner, and I one baking hot school day break-time. We sat down with them, had a conversation that pushed them to use the utmost of their English capabilities, and had, by the end, a plan to set up under 19’s cricket, football and rugby teams that would each practise in the school with us one evening of the week.

What happened next was startling: boys and girls, in every year group up and down the school, were assembling in parties, conversing, searching through their English books and knocking on our door, asking “Hello Mr Finn and Mr Tris. Can we have grade 8 cricket practice, please?” or “Grade 9 football practice, Tuesday?” or “Grade 7 rugby match Wednesday?” The word had spread like wildfire: some foreigners were here and they were prepared to offer afterschool activities.

At first we were quite taken aback by it all. Their enthusiasm was overwhelming. Now, I played sixth form cricket, and Finn was a first team rugby player until he broke his shoulder, and we could both kick a football – but when it came to actually coaching the sports, we hadn’t the slightest of knowhow. Yet, despite the inexperience, every pupil, even the boys who were older than us, seemed to trust us, to put faith in us that we knew what we were doing. And that gave us confidence.

Between Finn and I we could recall enough drills and exercises we had done at school, prior to adapting our own, and before long, we had a school of squads for whom we organised a host of inter-school matches and intra-school tournaments. Somehow, not even six weeks into the project, we were teaching a standard school day in the classroom, heading home, scoffing lunch, then heading straight back to school for two sports practices until the sun went down. Where previously there had been a deficiency of sports and afterschool clubs, suddenly there was a league of them.

Between the six of us – the four Project Trust volunteers and two others we worked with from an associated charity – we covered sports practices in football, cricket, rugby, badminton and volleyball, as well as arts, singing and dancing clubs; at one stage I even found myself teaching afterschool French lessons. But there was one thing that stood out the most, something that developed the most spectacularly.