Hill Country; part 3 – MENCAFEP

When I came to Sri Lanka in 2000 (on a University ‘field trip’) I visited a school in Nuwara Eliya for children with disabilities and learning difficulties. Twelve years later (when I knew we were coming back to Sri Lanka) and having found myself, more by circumstance than plan, with a good deal of experience of running participatory photography workshops for kids, and adults (both able bodied and not so) I thought that it would be good to return to the school and do some photography with the kids.

MENCAFEP (Mentally Handicapped Children and Families Education Project) is the only organisation in the country to provide educational support to children with disabilities and learning difficulties, and was started in 1988 by Englishman Chris Stubbs, and his wife Ranji. They now have an extensive program in Nuwara Eliya comprising a school for Pre School up to 18, a Vocational training unit for over 18’s, a home for kids who live too far away to get to the school everyday, or who just don’t have any family, a home visit service, various satellite centres around the area, and centres in Batticaloa, and Trincomalee.

I offered to do some PR shots for their website; http://www.mencafepsrilanka.com/ as well as running some workshops with the kids.

Music and dancing in the severely disabled unit

Severely disabled unit

Pre-school

Pre-school...hand printing

Tamil and Sinhala Educational Unit

Vocational Training Unit

Kids getting ready for lunch

Everyone wanted to have their picture taken...

Lunch is prepared, over a wood burning stove

Rice and curry...outside as the sun was out, (which apparently it's not, always here...)

and no knife and fork...this seems odd at first but eating with your fingers is normal here.

Home visit service...this is for kids who are unable to make it into school due to severe disabilities, or their families are unable to get them there

The home visit service provides valuable advice, nutrition/medical packs, and also companionship for the parents

This single room, and single bed, is home to four people.

Little girl with Downs Syndrome, outside her house. I took a little portable Polaroid printer with me on this occasion and gave this girl a print...then everyone down her street wanted one too. 

Having done lots of this kind of work in the UK it was interesting to compare with Sri Lanka. I was told that the prevailing attitude towards people with disabilities in Sri Lanka was that they had done something bad in a previous life, and therefore it was their karma which had determined their unfortunate existence in this one. In a country that is predominantly Buddhist and Hindu I guess that should hardly be surprising, but as a 21^st Century Westerner I obviously find that kind of thinking backward (to say the least) and offensive…who am I to judge though.

The attitude at MENCAFEP though is of course quite the opposite, and over their nearly 25 years they have managed to make considerable progress in both changing lives, and attitudes. Even over the intervening 12 years since I last visited, the school had grown considerably. We were given accommodation in the Family home unit which was a treat as the kids were really happy to have some new faces, and in particular because Noah now had some new friends to play with. Over the week that we were there we got to know a lot of the kids, and felt like we were briefly becoming part of the family.

Boy in the Family Home Unit

Family Home Unit

Homework in the Family Home Unit

This is Sarath, in the Family Home Unit. I'm not sure how old he is, but he's  over 18 and is now employed by the school. I'm almost positive I have a photograph of him, as a little boy, sitting on a swing, from the last time I visited! 

This is Amma, which means Mum...she looks after all the kids in the Family Home Unit

Unfortunately, funding at MENCAFEP is now becoming an issue, as Terre des Hommes, their major funder has decided to pull out of Sri Lanka due to the fact that the government keep insisting on the money going through government channels, rather than direct to charity...presumably so that they can use it for other things that they deem more pressing. 

The workshops I did with the kids were great fun too. These are kids who probably don’t even have their photo taken very often, let alone actually get to take photos; many of the kids at the school come from extremely poor backgrounds (from families of tea plantation workers etc) so the opportunity to have fun with a camera was something fairly unique. When I do this kind of work back home, most kids enjoy it too, but they all have a camera on their mobile phone, so it’s not as if they’ve never used a camera before! We did various different things but the pictures I like the most are the Macro ones they did;

'Something Blue' from the "picture Treasure Hunt" I did with the kids

Raindrops on a leaf...macro work with the kids

Colender,  from macro work with the kids

Light and dark on a leaf...macro work

Macro eyeball...with camera reflection

Necklace and skin texture, macro work

Me with some of the kids at the end of a workshop

When I showed them the photos on a projector they were clearly quite pleased with themselves, and this, for my part, is the thing I like most…seeing someone get the bug for taking pictures, and being really exited and enthusiastic about it is just great. I had been a little apprehensive about whether the language barrier would be too difficult to deal with, but photography being a visual language I guess that just didn’t matter in the end!

Chris, and some of the other staff I worked with were also very happy, and I’ve been invited to go back at some stage to do some more work there with the kids, with a view to doing a fund raising exhibition…bring it on, I love it!