A weekend trip to Kiru's Village

Every full moon is a Budhist holiday in Sri Lanka. So this last weekend Kiru invited us to spend the long weekend with his wife and kids at his family's village a few hours drive East of Colombo. On the way there we stopped at the elephant orphanage in Pinnewella. A 1/2 hour from Kandy. There are over 100 elephants there. You can walk right amoungst them as you see in the picture. There are "mahouts" there to keep an eye on everything. There are feeding times for the babies, and a bath time in the river which hopefully we'll see next time we go. Some of the pictures above are of the Royal Kandy gardens, a British enclave in Ceylons Tea hey days. The pictures below are of the Tea plantations . The ladies picking tea make 1 american dollar /day....as long as they don't die of snake bite, (thats what the 6 ft. long stick an the left middle, of the picture is for). Also on the way to various locations we mixed a little a little buisness with pleasure and visited a regional rual hospital with a local polititian. We spoke with 1 of the 2 doctors that work there and discussed his needs and talked about EMS. He also gave us a full tour of his 5 ward 70 bed hospital.

S0me of problems with the rual delivery aspects of EMS in in Sri lanka are access issues. The "bridge" you see below is the only way to get to a village of over 300 people. As you'll note by the picture below the sign leading to the "bridge" states it's rated now for 3 people. It was over 10 but has broke several times so it's load rating was dimnished on each occasion.

This is the same river were Bridge on The River Kwie was filmed. That night the power went 0ut at Kiru's house and what would have been a great sleep under a mosquito net with a fan, turned into an exercise for a reality show on t.v. Never the less the next morning we felt great with the cool mountain air breezing through the front patio and we were off to a national park located at 6,000 ft. elevation. More of the tea district, and monkey troups.

As often is the case the evening trip home to Colombo for the work week had 14 people in the NWMT van so some doubling up was required.