So hey, I’ve been in Sri Lanka for about a month now, and I’ll be staying for another month before traveling to the next country. You can follow all of this on my new site: http://thelowlander.org/ and I encourage you to do so, because I will be updating it more frequently than this site, and it has a lot more photos.
I’ve been staying mainly in Kosgoda for the first few weeks where I did volunteer work, with trips mostly taking place during the weekends. The volunteer work was with turtles, but you can see it as more of a holiday since most of the people who come here are gap year people. The work is not hard. And even though one might argue that cleaning the turtles and turtle tanks is dirty, it is still pretty light labor.
But now my time in Kosgoda has ended, and I’ve moved down south to a place called Weligama, where there is a big project about handicapped people. This project is so vast it makes the turtle project I was at previously pale in comparison. Not that it is any less luxurious, far from it, but there is just soo much more serious work to be done here. Stuff actually needs to be build and maintained here.
And that’s where Blender came in the second day I was here: They had previously built a tea nursery/plantage, but they used wooden poles, and woven ropes, which rot away very quickly around here. Which means the tea also rots/gets eaten by bugs, etc… So they asked me if I can weld one out of metal pipes. I can weld a little, so I said yes. But it turned out they did have the plans in their head, but not yet in paper. So to visualize it for myself, and to more easily calculate the lengths we’d be needing, I quickly drew up something in blender. The thing isn’t build yet, and I wonder how well it will go. The main idea is that the tea nursery is on flat ground, but the actual nursery is on an uneven slope. I’ll also be welding material I’ve never welded before, but hey I’m curious how it will turn out.
Here are some images. The blender drawing, and the photos of the current tea nursery:
Won't win any beauty awards, but it gets the idea across.
Welcome to Hellabeem.
The old tea nursery.