Hello everyone, welcome!

We are both passionate about travel and cultures and we wish to get involved as volunteers in order to lend our support to the communities in the village of Ambalangoda, Sri Lanka. For two weeks, we will teach English to the children of local schools and Buddhist monks of the village, encouraging them to learn a global language.

The projects take place in makeshift classrooms that can welcome many children, depending on the number of volunteers on-site. During that time, we will give engaging and interactive lessons to help these eager young minds reach their true potential. Besides allowing us to share our culture, we will be lucky enough to discover the customs and the local way of life in Sri Lanka.

Obviously, the population cannot finance this expensive project, so we need your help!

Sri Lanka’s education system is pretty impressive for a developing country of its size. Universal public education is available from the age of 6 to the age of 18. However, many government schools, particularly in rural areas, receive minimal government funding – especially considering the size of the communities they are expected to serve. The facilities at the schools are very basic, particularly the classrooms that get extremely cramped as average class sizes are around 40 to 60 children.

Conversing every day with fluent, native English speakers greatly improves the children’s language skills, essential for future employment. The ability to speak English is becoming more important in Sri Lanka, the two main sources of income coming from tourism and migrant workers going to the Middle East.

Yet, the class sizes are large and the teachers’ English-speaking skills are limited. Only the middle and upper-class children can afford private English lessons, causing even more inequalities. Our aim is to give the underprivileged children of Ambalangoda the same opportunities as their more wealthier peers so they too have the chance to develop their ability to speak English.

The Tsunami Village Project is an after-school education programme initiated by PMGY, which is based in the United Kingdom. This organization works in a number of Tsunami villages, which are a community of houses that were donated by the government and international charities to accommodate families who lost their homes after the Tsunami of 2004. The majority of the men in the village are fishermen who earn very little income.

The children attend local government schools during the mornings. The programme’s goal is to further their English language development by providing free after-school English lessons in the afternoons. From 3pm to 6pm, we will give the children English classes, and play with them the rest of the time. The volunteers can run three to six classes in each community, each welcoming about 10 to 12 students, in order to provide a much more personalized and fun educational support.

We will also offer our help in the village orphanages, as well as to rebuild and renovate the houses and temples.

As volunteers, we will also participate in the Temple School programme that assures the teaching of English to the Buddhist monks of the village. These young monks, aged from 6 to 8 years old speak very little English and will attend the classes from 8:30am to 10:30am so they can learn the basics. Moreover, the temples welcome underprivileged children from the community who can also enjoy these classes. In return for our contribution, we will find the monks keen to invite us to learn more about their religion and way of life.

Alice is 22 and Etienne is 24. We are both French and both students in the United States for the past 3 years. Alice studies advertising and communication, while Etienne studies kinesiology and occupational therapy. As passionate travelers, we explored together the United States, as well as Canada, Peru, and Bolivia. Each of these excursions made us eager to discover territories and unknown cultures. Volunteering would allow us to discover a new approach to the travel experience by giving to and sharing in the local culture.

Teaching volunteering in Sri Lanka