Service Centre in Sri Lanka Handed Over at Precisely the Right Time!

A new service centre and meeting-house for the residents of the fishing village Kandakuliya in Sri Lanka was officially opened on September 18 at a festive ceremony at precisely 10:59. The time had to be exact since it was chosen with the help of astrologers like is a custom in Sri Lanka when the timing of important events is decided.

Árni Helgason, ICEIDA’s Country Director, handed over the buildings to the newly formed cooperative society of the women in the village. Kandakuliya is the second village in Sri Lanka that gets a service centre.

In April this year, a similar building was handed over in the village of Toduwawa. The building of service centres on landing sites in Sri Lanka is a part of a project carried out by ICEIDA and the locals concerning development of landing sites. The service centre in Kandakuliya is the second out of seven in the first phase of the project and additional five are almost completed and will be handed over in the next few weeks according to Árni Helgason. He says that in the second phase of the project 18 places in the districts Ampara, Batticaloa and Trincomalee on the east coast have already been chosen.

“Preparations for buildings and the establishment of organisations in the villages are already underway,” says Árni, “and our main collaborators, the Sewalanka organisation, take care of the social aspects and engineers at ICEIDA’s office administer tenders and construction monitoring.”

Sewalanka is an independent organisation in Sri Lanka with over 1000 employees. The organisation focuses on social development among the villagers in the country and in ICEIDA’s landing sites project, it evaluates the positions and strenghts of the cooperative societies in the fishing villages. The organisation also helps developing the cooperative societies’ capacity to own and run the service centres that ICEIDA builds.