The Tea Factory Fire Appeal – September update
Following the incredible generosity of our friends and past guests over the past few weeks we received over £10,000.00 in donations to our appeal to help the employees of the Rosyth Tea Factory which burnt down at the end of April & the local community.
Neil & Farzana have just spent July and August in Sri Lanka with most of the time at the Rosyth Estate House. July, in particular, was a difficult month with insufficient fuel available to move around the island and the political instability leading to the many European Governments discouraging their nationals from travelling to Sri Lanka. The good news is that as we moved into August, the political situation has settled down under the new president, fuel has become more widely available, power cuts reduced and life across the island has gradually returned to a level of normality. We took the opportunity to travel extensively to the high tea country and southern beaches on business and the island is ready and waiting for tourists to return following the lifting of travel restrictions.
The day-to-day struggle for our local community around The Rosyth Estate, against a background of macro-economic collapse has continued. We continue to directly employ 10-12 workers from the tea factory daily and some are working to help establish a new factory facility a few miles away, close to Pinawella.
For those who have yet to find employment and in particular for the more elderly we have continued with food distribution in the 2nd week of August, supporting 25 households. However, given the funds raised, we have decided on two platforms for ongoing support for the remainder of this year.
We will continue to make a small number of targeted food donations to the elderly, but our main platform for support will be a school meals program. We have launched a program to directly provide a meal for 60 children at our local primary school three times per week. On Monday, Wednesday & Friday every child is receiving a cooked breakfast – in consultation with the school principal & government nutrition best practice, we are cooking a meal based on pulses – chickpeas, green gram and cowpeas, prepared with fresh onions, coconut and spices. For the time being this food is being prepared by our chefs in the kitchen at The Rosyth Estate House and we are planning to transfer the cooking to one of the school mothers as the weeks progress. Similar initiatives to this are offered by aid agencies in some of the poorest communities elsewhere in the island and we felt that by directly helping the children we target some of the most vulnerable and support their health, welfare & development at this time. We have committed to an initial period of three months & providing it has the continuing support of the school principal we will extend the initiative into 2023.
Supporting the local school has been at the heart of several projects which we have already undertaken pre pandemic and we hope to continue to enrich the lives of the children into the future.
Plans to set up an artisan tea operation at Rosyth are continuing. During August we have visited three artisan tea projects based in the high tea country near Ella, close to the Sinharaja Rain Forest and the slopes of Adam’s Peak. Back at Rosyth we have experimented with our own hand rolled tea – with initial samples being very encouraging. As the year progresses, we will move towards setting up a small operation and establishing our own social economic project aimed to help develop the local community.
Thank you once again for your support. We will continue to publish updates on our blog site.
Neil, Farzana, Oliver, Mikal.