*Transcribed*
Since I’m spending the first few days in the capital city, my aunt and her friend Michael took me out for dinner this evening. We went to a small restaurant / salsa dancing place and had fajitas, quesadillas etc. Here’s the interesting part: Michael was going to invite his cousin (James) to the tapas (tapas = snacks in Spanish) place, but his cousin ended up at a pool hall which was a street away. Once we got there, I saw Hannah, her friend Luke and James. Hannah was the girl with the Australian accent from the airport yesterday. Talk about a small world: James, Hannah and I were all on the same flight! She said James and I were the only 2 people she spoke to on the plane and what are the odds that we would all meet up again? Now I realize how I wasn’t paying any attention and how tired I must have been (I hadn’t slept for over 24 hours by that point) to think she had an Australian accent! It clearly wasn’t Australian once I was actually listening! It sounded Irish to me. It turns out she’s from Glasgow (Sorry gems, I didn’t remember which school you went to out there!). She and Luke have been to Sri Lanka before for a year, so they know the area much better than I do. Luke is doing some project planning for the Methodist church. This brings me to some of the things I will be doing:
I will help prepare a project proposal for housing in the Ampara* region. In terms of the project, I will be around for the preliminary investigation, needs assessment, requirements planning, design and parts of the implementation (does this SDLC sound familiar MIS’ers? 
). I’ve got some experience in project management, so working with experts should be pretty neat. The AOG (Assemblies of God) organization asked if I could help dig wells and organize construction projects. The pastor I spoke to suggested that the Christian organizations here don’t have many people with my tech/management skills readily available. Tomorrow, I’m going to see the Volunteer Sri Lanka people to find out if they will need my services later on during my stay. They’re located in the Microsoft offices at the World Trade Center; that should be cool to see. Finally, I might also be doing some music workshops for orphaned kids (playing the guitar and singing songs with them I guess). Obviously, I’m glad to see that I’m needed but I’ll have to wait and see what I actually end up doing. I’ll be here for a while, so I’m pretty sure I should be able to squeeze a lot of this is in! My grandfather is taking the rest of the week to rest and I’m still looking around and getting a few administrative things sorted out because all this gets started.
*Why Ampara? – I came here to help the helpless. I mentioned Galle is already getting plenty of aid and so I was going to go northeast. Apparently the northeast [Tamil] region is getting a lot of help from the TRO [Tamil Rehabilitation Organization]. It seems that people in the Ampara (mostly Muslim) region are the ones being bypassed, so we’re going there to see what we can do to help.