Mike Crawshaw From
IVS Chairman Mike Crawshaw is currently away on a workcamp in Sri Lanka, for three months, where he is teaching English. He has sent us a report of his travels so far… It rained last night – when I say it rained it rained like you think it is never going to stop. January and February should have been the rainy season, but it didn’t, – rain that is. I was showing someone in my English Conversation class a picture I’d taken that day of the Hindu god Shiva, when there was a clap of thunder and the heavens opened like a tap had been turned on. I have never seen rain like it; certainly, we get some heavy thunderstorms in the UK but they are usually over in a couple of minutes. This lasted several hours, banging and crashing like an angry deity having a major strop, eventually turning into a low rumble which lasted all night, finally dying out just as I set out for the project office at 6.15 the next morning. Mutur was an island when the Tsunami hit on 26th December 2004. It was also on the periphery of the civil war between the Sri Lankan military and the separatist Tamil Tigers. This conflict only ended in 2009 with an almighty and bloody thrust into the Jaffna Peninsula, heart of the Tamil Tiger’s resistance movement. Since then the island has been joined to the mainland by several modern bridges which make the journey into Trincomalee – or Trinco...
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