Fundraising update.
The generosity of our friends and past guests over the past few weeks has been truly amazing & deeply heart-warming & we really apologise that we haven’t been able to send personal replies to everyone. To date, we have received nearly £10,000.00 in donations to our appeal tohelp the employees of the Rosyth Tea Factory which burnt down at the end of April & the membersof the local community. We set a modest target of £2,500, upped it to £5,000 and have been astounded that it has kept growing. Whilst we have met many people who have kindly donated, some we have not, and we really appreciate your thoughts and kindness. Every penny will be spent
on supporting the community over the months to come.
I am sure everyone has been following Sri Lanka in the press and seeing some of the events which have been unfolding over recent weeks – both the political and economic woe which the country is
facing. Some of the reporting has been overly sensational, but the political resignations and regime change which happened this week are not unexpected, and we remain optimistic that this will be the beginning of the economic recovery under the management of a coalition government, with the deeply unpopular Rajapaksa family and their cronies being removed by a popularist uprising.
The day-to-day struggle for our local community around The Rosyth Estate, against a background of
macro-economic collapse, is real. Over the past two months, some of the tea factory employees
have been employed on a casual basis in a temporary tea processing facility, that the factory owner
has set up and I am pleased that we have personally been able to give some work to ten employees
on a casual basis within our estate. Others have not been able to find alternate work & struggle on a
daily basis. All, however, are struggling with food inflation running at over 100% this year to date,
following the collapse of the rupee.
On Wednesday 6th July we made the second distribution of food and the first donation utilising the
funds from the JustGiving site appeal– supporting some 70 employees and their families. Each
person received 10 kg of rice, dhal, sugar, coconut oil, onions, garlic & a selection of other staple
food ingredients, we hope enough to support them for a month.
Whilst we do not want to create an expectation, nor a dependency on food handouts, at this very
difficult economic time, when pay rates are not keeping up with food inflation, it seems like we will
probably need to do this for a few months to come and the money raised to date will facilitate this.
The reaction from the tea factory employees was truly humbling and we are so pleased to be able to
help in this small way.
We are also thinking about the medium to long term and want to support the community with
another tea-based project. To this end, our younger son Mikal is developing a project over the next
few months to set up an artisan tea operation at Rosyth. The idea, which we have been considering
since lockdown is being accelerated – further details will be published in a few days’ time. It will be a
social enterprise project aimed to help develop the local community.
Thank you once again. We will continue to publish updates on our blog site.
Neil, Farzana, Oliver, Mikal Dobbs