"To improve the quality of life, 

increase opportunities,

 enable choice for poor families 

and promote peace, 

through education"

The Tea Leaf Trust is committed to providing opportunities through education for the poor, regardless of gender, ethnicity or religion. The opportunity to learn will initially target children aged 7-12 and young adults aged 18-24. All will be taught in an environment that is safe and promotes equality and mutual respect. 

Opportunities through education - more than improving employability

Structured educational programmes bring about obvious benefits, that being that both increase the likelihood of obtaining work that is better paid.

Whilst this is of the utmost importance in these communities, and one of the key drivers for the Tea Leaf Trust, education has been shown to influence far more than just employability; it as been linked to improved physical and mental health and habits that influence both of these.

Education has also been linked to community relationships and can promote cohesion between different community factions. Education also promotes engagement in the outside world, which can help people grow into fully rounded individuals and help them to make informed decisions. This is important in areas such as in politics and human rights, so that people can demand that the government acts in their interests.

Below outlines the effects that education has been shown to have on employability, community cohesion, emotional health and global engagement, and why each of these is so important to our target communities (Tea Estate workers and farm labourers).

Opportunities through education - employability

This is crucial in the communities we are targeting. Unemployment is rife and ever increasing on the Tea Estates and cultivation farms. The global financial crisis has hit both of these industries very hard. Many of the young adults seeking employment on Tea Estates and farmland do so because they have no other chance or choice of employment. Many of these young adults had left school early to help their parents earn extra money, but cannot find paid work as they mature to adulthood, and their lack of education means that they are unable to find work elsewhere. Through the Tea Leaf Trust education programmes, our students will be able to find employment in a variety of different business arenas. The Tea Leaf Trust will monitor the progress of these students, to ensure their personal development and ethical treatment in the workplace.

Opportunities through education - cohesion

Most children and adolescents in Sri Lanka will attend government schools and these are specific to ethnicity as a result of the language the curriculum is taught in. So, Singhalese children will have attended government schools teaching in the Singhala medium and Tamil students will have attended government schools taught in the Tamil medium. Muslim students mainly attend schools that teach in the Tamil language or Islamic schools. 

School material will also be subject to segregation, texts used for the different lessons focusing on the ethnicity of one particular group, rather than reflecting the multicultural country that is Sri Lanka. In recent times, some of the text books that children use for subjects such as religious education, social studies and languages have tried to reflect this but sometimes this has gone to the opposite extreme, e.g. in some texts, all references to ethnicity and related issues have been removed. This means that the population of ethnically-diverse Sri Lankan children have little or no idea about the culture and customs of each other. As they grow up, these differences can lead to unrest, fear and mistrust, and the potential for violence.

Promotion of ethnic cohesion, through the opportunity for young adults of diverse ethnic backgrounds to share a common language and educational resources, should not be underestimated. Working together, sharing experiences and learning about each other both in the classroom and through extra curriculum activities, can help overcome the negative impressions and mistrust that these young adults may have toward each other as a result of segregated schooling and wartime propaganda, paving the way for friendship, mutual understanding and positive social interaction. 

Opportunities through education - emotional health

Whilst the rates of deliberate self-harm (DSH), suicide and violence against women is highly concerning across Sri Lanka, Maskeliya and its surrounding areas has in particular has been identified by the in-country division of UNFPA an area within the country that warrants particular focus (personal communiqué with Dr Farook, Lead Psychiatrist for the area, 26/07/10).  This is primarily due to the fact that although suicide, DSH and violence against women are well-known to be commonplace throughout the tea-estate areas, there is currently a paucity of evidence which goes beyond anecdotal information to document the prevalence and causes in this area. Consequently there is staggering dearth of services designed to support girls and women who experience violence and abuse.   

Good emotional health and social skills have been cited as more important for achieving success at school, work and in an individual's personal life than a person's cognitive ability (Samaritans 1999). Furthermore, medical studies have identified a strong correlation between emotional and physical health and emphasise the impact that poor emotional health management, particularly  stress, has on adverse physical health outcomes  (Rozanski 2005, Rozanski et al 2005). Thus in educating our students on positive strategies they can employ to manage stress and strengthen their emotional health, we hope to have an overall impact on their well-being, both in the short and long term.

We will be introducing an emotional health module to the curriculum, to equip our students with the knowledge and skills to effectively deal with the challenges they face on a daily basis and throughout their lives. As well as providing an outlet in the form of a safe environment for students to explore and understand their emotions, this class also strives to help students manage their emotions, whilst enabling them to strengthen their emotional health through identifying, developing and adopting healthy coping strategies and measures within their lives. In attempting to instil the  positive ways that emotions can be managed, we hope to divert our students away from the damaging alternatives of alcohol, drugs, deliberate self harm and suicide.

 

Opportunities through education - global engagement

People who are better educated are generally more engaged in the world around them. Education stimulates curiosity and motivates knowledge acquisition outside of formal learning. The wider aims of our educational programmes are to encourage student interest in the world around them, to open their minds to new ideas and expand their achievement horizons, to change entrenched attitudes about other ethnicities, religions and gender, helping them to make informed choices in any decision-making processes that they encounter.

Education instills confidence and boosts self-esteem and self-worth. People who are educated are more likely to be aware of their civil liberties and recognise discrimination; they are more likely to seek out and demand their entitlements, to peacefully challenge authority about their treatment and demand the human rights afforded to them. Never is this more important than in the Tea Estates and rural farmlands; poverty keeps people in a state of fear and promotes hopelessness. As a result, people are more likely to accept ill-treatment and persecution as their fate. An attitude of 'what's the point of fighting' prevails in these communities, something we want to start to change at a grassroots level.

 

References:

Rozanski, A. (2005) 'Integrating Psychologic Approaches Into the Behavioral Management of Cardiac Patients' Psychosomatic Medicine  Vol. 67, Supplement 1, S67-S73

 

Rozanski, A.,  Blumenthal, J., Davidson, K., Saab, P., and Kubzansky, L. (2005) 'The epidemiology, pathophysiology, and management of psychosocial risk factors in cardiac practice: The emerging field of behavioral cardiology' Journal of the American College of Cardiology Vol 45, 637-651 Available http://content.onlinejacc.org/cgi/content/full/45/5/637 [22.11.09]
 

Samaritans (1999) 'Youth Pack: Helping You Help Young People' [Online] Available http://www.samaritans.org/pdf/Samaritans-youngpeople.pdf [15th July 2010]