Experiences with dedicated officials worth commenting on

by Lokubanda Tillakaratne

My village Maradankalla is located six kilometres south off Anuradhapura-Trincomalee Road (A12) above Mahakanadarawa wewa, near Mihintale, in the North Central Province. But I have lived in Los Angeles for the past 43 years. During all these years, this village is where my heart has been.

Although the history of Maradankalla spans centuries, it was not on the map of the country until 1947 when its elders built the one-room school hoping the government would hear about it and step into support. Soon after it was built, the small wattle and daub schoolhouse got space for the village on the maps that came out later. In the same year, the Anuradhapura Madya Maha Vidyalaya was started 10 kilometres south of the Sacred City, under the Central College concept of the C.W. W. Kannangara era. It remains the jewel and the axis mundi of the provincial education. But as time passed, villagers realized this well-thought of Kannangara idea helped create an educational tribal system. That’s a story for another day.

The two tales I write about say how this small village in the backwoods of Anuradhapura District got connected to telephone landlines and internet to its school, got two new sluice gates and a new spillway for its irrigation tank which irrigates 60 acres of paddy lands. This is an ode to all those involved in these projects discussed here.

For A/GB/Maradankalla school, the telephone line is the instant highway to communication and the internet heaven which most city folks take for granted. The two new sluice gates will replace leaky sluices built probably in the dinosaur age.

Disparate and Separate,Supposedly Equal

Sadly, though, over the last few decades, some schools, a few kilometres from Maradankalla, lost their map space and disappeared into the hereafter. One such school is A/GB/Ihalagama, above Mahakanadarawa wewa. It is deserted now. Its crumbling buildings occupy an eerie landscape overgrown with brush. Now only the families of elephants come there daily for night classes!

Nevertheless, thanks to the untiring dedication of the teaching staff and resilience of parents, Maradankalla school still survives, like similar schools threatened with lack of modern facilities and difficulties, to keep up with well-equipped schools elsewhere. This school is still a magnet to 180 students from a few villages around it. Like its sister schools in similarly remote areas, it has precious talent and hidden gems. Every year, it sends a couple of students to city schools on 5th grade scholarship examination results. One such student, a resident of Maradankalla itself, just graduated from the Peradeniya Medical School. Another is a Law College graduate. Few more attend universities still as I write this. So, any epithet that the village school students lack potential is a myth and an outright insult.

This shows what failure and shame rural education had been on the part of all of us. In my reckoning, this misfortune was due to lukewarm Interest from the education authorities to highlight and address the systemic decay in education equality in village schools, and failure to provide an environment with new pedagogical ideas and improvements to arrest the degeneration and make these schools attractive and competitive. Retooling them to fight the draw of urban sprawl and slow down students from migrating to the city schools never found a footing here. This put parents at greater disadvantage and pressure, appallingly first with pervasive national disgrace of payoffs to school officials to get the child’s place in the city school, and other related costs.

On the other hand, Madya Maya Vidyalaya, of the same age as Maradankalla school, has over 4000 students, and is crowded to suffocation. As expected, it sends many scores of students every year to universities for higher studies. It is in the class of education royalty with the designation of ‘National School’ which is generally rewarded with, among other perks, a computer room of substantial size with internet facilities. A NASA regional Control Room comes to my mind.

But no one should get lulled into thinking that students in the schools in run-down sections of the cities get the short end of educational opportunities and second-hand treatment, too, and use it as defence to rationalize inequities students in village schools receive. Less than exemplary treatment of schools in poorer sections of the city is an injustice beyond comparison, and unacceptable. But in the village, I might add, patronized by herds of wild elephants on a nightly basis and staffed by stellar teachers, the level of educational assistance the kids there get is so bad, it is an unspeakable travesty and tragedy. One should not tell me otherwise. I know. Because I once lived through it!

Until a few weeks ago, Maradankalla school had no phone landlines, therefore it was locked out of the Internet. But it has two working computers sitting in a converted classroom. Computer facilities elsewhere with every unit connected to the Internet and usually declared opened with pageantry by VIPs of the Machiavellian political nobility, in a room bristling with air-conditioning and so much care, to enter them one must remove shoes to prevent dust and detritus desecrating their holy environment.

Meanwhile, the principal of the village school sends his mandatory reports to the Kalaape (Zonal) office through his handphone, or while Gedara Yana Gaman through a copy. And faxing store in the town.For the principal in the city, it is so quotidian, it only takes him few keystrokes on his desktop computer: Disparate and separate but supposedly equal.

Homework or Looking for Landmines?

According to the Computer Literacy Survey for 2021 by the Department of Census and Statistics, North Central Province scored the lowest computer literacy rate in the country at 24.8% while the highest was reported, no surprise there, in the Western Province at 47.1%. Maradankalla feels the heat of this alarming disparity. It sits in the dead centre of the North Central Province.

When education policymakers send out fiat asking students to do homework using Internet on their handphones, they give little thought to these survey results. For convenience, these experts who devise education policies take them out of the equation. For them, the homework is for all students across the board, without caste or creed, in well-equipped schools and in schools with one or two working computers in a converted classroom.

Without land phone lines, a village school student has no access to the Internet, even if one is lucky enough to have a computer at home. These students use their parents’ flip phones, not the cool Samsung type others carry around with conceit. When the Education Lords ask these students to do homework and ZOOM classes by phone or at home at Maradankalla, it is akin to Marie Antoinette telling her subjects “Let them eat cake.”

During the COVID times, well, those few students who managed to have the out-of-production phones climbed the rocky outcrop by their village temple to do homework. They pointed the phones literally in all directions looking for good reception. The sad irony of this is that anyone who saw them would have mistaken them for looking for landmines using metal detectors! Meanwhile, our own Antoinettes and Antons of the policymaking fellowship carry beauties in the Rs. 200,000 range talking to their children attending foreign universities or working in embassies and consulates overseas. This is not hearsay or imagination. This is the reality.

After the Internet crept in as an educational tool, and not having it in Maradankalla school, for a long time I wanted to do something to mollify the burden dumped on its students and teachers by this ‘fair and modern educational atrocity.’ I spoke to the principal and decided to write to government officials and the private phone companies to see if they could help us to build the road to the Internet here. Sadly, after introducing Internet-based pedagogical practices, the education authorities seem to have not made any coordinated efforts to get village schools like Maradankalla connected to the wired telephone world.

In response to our appeals, the DIALOG phone company showed its heart and worth and stepped in. A couple of years ago, they built a giant tower about 400 metres from the school, hoping reception signals would improve. But the school was still out of luck as for some unknown reason, the signals were not strong enough to have a reliable and viable Internet connection to the school.

A Pensioner’s Crusade

Then, in 2018, I and my brother T. A. M. B. Thilakarathna, a retired special education teacher, took it upon us and wrote to SLT-MOBITEL in Anuradhapura for help to get a landline rolled out to the village. We knew it was a gargantuan task, probably a request that would easily end up in the waste-paper basket. That year when I came home on vacation, I also went to the Telecom office and repeated our request.

We knew the thought of rolling out six kilometres of coir rope was irrational and testing enough, thinking of a fibre-optic phone line even half that length connecting us to satellites many stratospheres above was beyond insane. But my brother, amiable, persistent and with an infectious smile at every turn, began to visit government offices in Anuradhapura looking for a solution to this problem. His milk-white fluffy beard resembling that of a Himalayan Rishi and matching moustache of a Ravana mirrored his determination for success. The unkept white band of hair in the back of his bald head danced like tail feathers of a messenger pigeon in flight.

Sure enough, as weeks and months passed behind him, the message he carried resonated enough, this unassuming retiree’s frequent visits to the telecom offices must have made its administrators’ hearts soften. They listened and decided to do something about his plight. Soon, the machinery of the bureaucracy came to life, loosened their joints and Maradankalla got the ticket to its wish – a phone landline to join the Internet.

(I must note with appreciation that our efforts on this project were boosted by the encouragement, advice and inordinate support we received from Themiya Hurulle, a patron with deep ancestral roots and affinity to the region.)

For a span of three weeks last month, the SLT-MOBITEL technicians and engineers worked on the construction of the phone lines. Showing his own hospitality and dedication, my brother spent a good portion of his monthly retirement deposit to buy food packets daily for about half a dozen workers.

Finally, the parents, their children and teachers got their desideratum granted. The school is now in the Internet brotherhood. I am paying its monthly Internet bills and my wife Niranjala, and daughter Mihiri have teamed up to design some ZOOM activities with the students. These gestures are not as grandiose as a parent buying a bus for a school, a new cricket pitch in the playground, all embarrassing and shameful but commonplace now in most schools in populous areas. But at least on paper, this school seems like it is on a level playing field on the Internet. A round-the-clock air-conditioned room with new computers will complete the curve. That is another educational infrastructure matter the school must work on.

Finally, my brother successfully persuaded 20 households out of 53 in the village to have landphone connections! He even paid half of some villagers’ application fees. That is evidence of how much interest these villagers have given a chance to better their lives.

Last month, when I came home with my family to Maradankalla on vacation, I found myself having to deal with another pressing problem in the village. This time it was another arm of the government bureaucracy.

Every time I come home on vacation, early in the next morning usually, almost as a ritual, we take a stroll on the tank bund in front of our home to listen to the songs of water birds, feel the warmth of the cold air blowing across the tank bed and watch the breathtaking sight of the morning sun radiating off dewy rice paddies spotted with peacocks pacing with glitter and swank.

However, on this day what we saw on the bund dampened our spirits. The two sluice gates, (horowwa) were mournfully open to the dry tank bed where sandbags covered their openings. They were cracked, and chunks of concrete were falling apart. Then at the end of Medieval-like Sluice gate. Note the cracks and sandbag used to open and close it.

The bund, the spillway had fallen apart due to shoddy construction and being part of an elephant crossing. I took 27 photos and decided to go and meet someone at the Provincial Irrigation Office about this potential calamity looming ahead in the coming Maha season.

Medieval-Age Sluice Gates Replaced

It is not an embellishment to say that villagers treat water in their irrigation tank as thicker than blood. How could one not agree?

Paddy cultivation is the only source of living for nearly all of these villagers.

So, I spoke to the village Govi Sanvidhana members, wrote a letter about this issue and with them went to Anuradhapura to meet the Provincial Irrigation Director Jayantha Herath and his area Engineering staff. I had little hope that day of turning the wheels of bureaucracy.

But the magnanimous response of the Director and his office was instant and remarkable. It proved their worth and being. The Provincial Irrigation leadership worked hard to get the sluice gates and spillway repaired. It went further and determined that the Provincial RDA with its expertise, ready machinery and labour would expeditiously finish the project before the Maha rains. They are working on the sluices and the spillway as I write this.

Other Attempts in the Past

In order to draw the attention of the government to the needs of the community, this is not the first time I have written to government officials.

In the early 1990s, President Premadasa decided to have an Udagama to be held in Mihintale. Immediately, word got out that villages in the vicinity of Mihintale were going to be linked to the electrical grid of the country as part of the celebrations. This news electrified the villagers in Maradankalla. Immediately, I wrote a letter to the then President and posted it hoping we might hit the jackpot. ‘What is there to lose,’ I thought at the time.

By writing the letter, I wanted to feel good about doing something, but never expected it would get anywhere. That is how these things usually work in big offices – if the letter didn’t get lost in transmission, there is a better chance it will get lost in translation. But the Good President made sure my letter ended up on the desk of the Electrical Engineering folks in Anuradhapura. Surprisingly, within weeks they came to Maradankalla looking for me. My brother met them, and the Engineer gave an update about the project that was going to follow. I won’t deny it, I was surprised and equally exhilarated to hear of this development.

Consequently, the villagers in and around Maradankalla got their illuminating moment. To optimize dwindling funding resources, we banded together to help out and cut trees along the route to clear space for the power lines. Although Maradankalla is eight kilometres from Udagama, now the home to the bustling Raja Rata University, it now has electricity. Life there with oil lamps and kerosene carts is long gone history. Unfortunately, President Premadasa’s untimely death prevented him from enjoying the Udagama and consequential fruits it brought to the area.

Allegory of the Stories

The allegory of these pleasant stories is if someone writes to the bureaucracy asking for help, not for personal but about an issue in your community, hold on to some hope. A godly person, and a mighty unusual one you didn’t know that existed sitting somewhere behind a desk in an office would read it. I am not naïve here to give a pass to all bureaucrats. But this official you write to is different – utterly decent, courteous and if you go to meet that person, he or she will shake your hand or close the palms together and say “Ayubowan,” offer you a seat and listen to your problem eagerly and earnestly as if it is that person’s own. He or she is sure to treat you like an equal and a friend, and in the middle of the conversation even offer you a cup of tea. That person is honourable and good, lives up to his or her responsibility and is kind enough to take up the issue and do something in their power.

Then villagers may not have to worry about Maha season water, thanks, in this case, to the Provincial Irrigation folks and Provincial RDA and its technicians and Engineer, or the folks who brought the Internet to their village school.

With the new sluice gates and the spillway, thankful Maradankalla villagers will be eager to start the Maha season work and look forward to the Yala season with water saved with air-tight sluice gates. With the Internet, village school students will have more ways to learn about homework assignments. Villagers will have the opportunity to listen to ubiquitous religious talks on YouTube and keep up with the Teledrama parade. These stories perhaps will no doubt become yesterday’s newspaper to many. But in my village, these are tales of life-changing moments, which they will talk about for many years to come. Each time the story is told, they will solemnly reminisce about the experience and thank those who made it happen.