A Brief History of VESL
The ceasefire in Sri Lanka in 2002 opened up areas of the country that had previously been cut off during the civil war and for the first time in many years, travel into schools in these areas became a real possibility. In its first year of operation, VESL¹ was able to establish links with a number of schools in rural areas of the North, East and Central Provinces, enabling projects to run within Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim communities.
In 2003 VESL sent a small team of volunteers to establish projects in primary and secondary schools across five rural areas within Sri Lanka. The volunteers were greeted with huge enthusiasm from the schools and surrounding communities and were able to run projects both inside and outside the school timetable. In some schools volunteers also ran classes for teachers. Within every region our team visited, the shortage of teachers and resources was countered by the passion and energy of every student.
The programme offered the participants a unique opportunity to gain an understanding of life within these communities and of the everyday issues associated with living in rural areas recovering from conflict. Living in family households, the volunteers were fully immersed in Sri Lankan culture.
After the success of that inaugural year, VESL received numerous requests to return from the Sri Lankan education department, and from the schools themselves. In January 2004, VESL gained registered charity status and has gone on to run successful summer programmes every year since.
Where are we now
Since 2003 VESL has gone from strength to strength as each set of volunteers continued to push the bounderies of what could be achieved. A mark of everyone's efforts came in 2005 when the Sri Lankan government signed an M.O.U. [Memoradum of Understanding] and gave VESL official N.G.O. status within the country.
In addition to our activities within schools we were able to run a number of teacher training workshops for local Sri Lankan teachers. These initial workshops received great praise from everyone involved and the Sri Lankan government requested that we continue to develop this project. In 2006 and 2007 a dedicated team of teachers from the UK were able to run workshops for more than 1400 Sri Lankan teachers and feedback showed the project to be a resounding success.
In 2007, VESL was very pround to send its first volunteers to India to work on a range of education and community development projects. We were able to start sending our first volunteers on 3 and 6 month placements and VESL also empolyed its first overseas in-country managers.
The success of our Sri Lankan and Indian programme allowed us to continue to expand our efforts and 2008 saw the start of our Thailand programme which has already proved a great success.
In addition to our teaching programme VESL set up an Education Fund in 2005 in response to the Tsunami and we have been able to help assist in funding local teachers within schools in the North East of Sri Lanka.
¹ VESL was originally regestered with the Charity Commision as 'Volunteers for English in Sri Lanka' (reg. in England and Wales - charity no. 1101749). Due to our expanding charitable aim and our desire to run projects outside of Sri Lanka, VESL changed the organisations structure and name to 'Volunteer for Educational Support and Learning'. VESL continues to be run by the same team of committed individuals and our desire to work in Sri Lanka has not changed.