Emergency Coronavirus Response

Hello!

Firstly, we send our good wishes to all of you whereever you are and hope that you and your loved ones are safe and well in this challenging year.

Many countries throughout the world have been facing a second wave of Covid-lockdowns and Sri Lanka is not exception. At the beginning of October, it is believed that a buyer from a garment factory returned from a work trip to India and was not picked up as positive. The person returned to work and within a week over a 1,000 cases were found within the factory. Before this transpired, the situation was made worse when all of the workers had a long weekend for the Poya Full Moon bank holiday and many returned to families around the island. After reporting only 3,369 cases and 13 deaths in a well-managed first wave, cases are now well in excess of 10,000.

For our communities, this means that our centres have been shut again after opening in August for around 6 weeks. There have been curfews around the island over the last month, although currently our areas have not been affected other than through all schools being closed.

We have made a decision to offer our 2020 students places again for the 2021 programme, as they have been able to have less than 4 months of lessons this year. Those who are not able to retake will gain a Basic English Certificate rather than our Main Diploma.

We are grateful for your support for this project  - we were able to support over 11,000 individuals from 25 different areas. Any further donations will be used to support our communities as they recover from the economic hardship of losing their livelihoods for such an extended period of time - our employability centre has seen a 40% increase in alumni needing to find new work opportunities.

Thank you, and stay safe,

Tim and all at Tea Leaf Trust