Blue Lotus Buddhist Fellowship

SUBBA ALUTH AVURUDAK WEVA!!!
HAPPY SINGHALESE NEW YEAR !!!!!

Dear friends,

Yes we had a New Year celebration again!
No, don’t worry, we don’t celebrate New Year every 3 months lol!
Just twice a year; 1st of January and the 14th of April.

We will take this opportunity to give you a list of the things we did during the past few months, and inform you about the status of the other projects.
You will find a list of needs for this year in an earlier post, some things are not needed anymore and some things will be new and they will be posted later.

Our big project sponsored by The Randolph Fellowship from Holland is The Randolph College in Telwatta and this project is going on well, thanks to the people of the Randolph Fellowship. I would like to thank them for all their efforts and tell them that we admire them greatly! Visit their new website www.randolphfellowship.com for more info.

In the mean time we did not do so badly ourselves neither lol!!!

Miss Elles Mol who came to Lanka as a volunteer was, with the help of here friends, able to donate a great sum of SRS. 170.000. Yes, she donated another SRS 80.000 which here friends collected and send here; We are so grateful for these donations because it enabled us to help a lot of people as you will read:

Some of here friends organized a small benefit concert, a great idea and we like to thank them for it again! You can read about it in an older blog entry but we would like to give you all the news about what we did with the money which was left;

We where able to build a much needed bathroom for the young lady (the Montesory teacher, this case we described in our list of needs earlier). She can use the bathroom now independently because we made it big enough to entre with here wheelchair. It did cost quite a bit more but so be it. She a very happy young lady now, thanks to you all!!!

A Tsunami village near Ambalangoda was in problems because their water pomp was broken down. The costs to repair the pomp where 31.000 SRS. From the money which was left from this donation we could pay the repair.

The deaf and mute girl is going to the school right now because we where able to pay for here travel expenses for a year! Thanks to you, friends of Elles! We will post some pictures on this item later.

Then the next item:
The 1st of January our dear friends Piet en Durna arrived from Holland again, and started of their 1st day of the year and the 1st day of their stay in a wonderful way!!!

They enabled us to arrange a real party for 42 children from the villages of Telwatta, Kahawa and Akurala! They donated all of them with schoolbooks, pencil boxes, pastel colouring boxes and pens. All the kids got also a pair of new shoes which they needed to be able to go to school (slippers are not allowed).

Thanks to a donation of around 800 ballpoints, 50 “passer boxes, and 20 “ruler sets (considered here as professional sets) we received from Mr. Bert van Malsem – Lifeoka Bv. of Den Haag in Holland, we where able to donated them all with those items to!!!

(This whole lot was brought by Mr. Peter Sandkuyl, brother of Sander, who came to visit us with his family).

Our friends Piet and Durna continued to support our project in Akurala where we during their 1st visit where able to get 24 woman to work independently producing coja ropes (read our earlier post). This time we succeeded to have another 60 woman to start and do the same!!!!

Not only that they are independent and work to get the benefit of it themselves, they are also preparing and organizing themselves, with the help of our secretary Mr. De Silva, to form a collective or even a corporation and will save a few SRS a month so they will have some money. They want to save for special occasions and for example for when one of them is in trouble they can, without interest, borrow a small amount to help them out.

In corporation with other groups Piet and Durna organized a number of other projects during their stay here. We want to compliment this wonderful couple of people who work so hard to collect funds for these projects. Projects which are all for the benefit of the poorest of the poor!

Thank you Piet and Durna!!! We here at the Sri Metta Ashrama are Proud and Happy to call you our friends!!!!!

We consider ourselves so Lucky! We found good friends in life; that’s Lucky!. We are meeting every time new friends and are not loosing old friends, that’s Lucky! We are able to help those in real need with the help of our friends; that’s Lucky! We experience Love, Kindness and Compassion; that’s Lucky!! We live being satisfied; that’s Lucky! We are Happy with our live; that’s Lucky! Thanks to you ! We are really Lucky!

Next to come:

Intra-religious meeting; 1st of its kind meeting between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist under the motto of “Unity in Diversity!” a moderate meeting and a great success!

House donated for one of the poorest family’s in our arrear!

Dear friends, here are some pictures which where long over due.They where mostly made during the heavy rains in October and November last year. We also started to post more pictures on Picasa, some are a bit older,and we think it will give you some idear about our daily live and works. Further more; it are realy very beautyfull pics so I'm quite sure that you will enjoy them!

The Picasa adres is: http://picasaweb.google.com/h.s.devamitta

please check out this site regurarely, we will update it nearly daily because Rev. Ariyadhamma is going to do this work. The remarks we had on some of this pictures on Facebook where so great that we decided to up load them, so you will be able to see more of us :-). I must say they are verry ilustrative. The pictures are made by Mr. George Höfer, Rev. Ariyadhamma, some by me (the lesser once's :-) ), and by some other people (their names might sometimes be given sometimes on request only because they want it so). So enjoy them.
Devamitta Thera.