The beginnings of an idea

We have a Sri Lankan friend, Uma Raj, who returned to work in Tamil Eelam about three years ago. She’s a young woman with a vision impairment that will continue to deteriorate until she becomes totally blind. Uma wants to help other Tamil people with vision impairment. She has written to friends in Australia asking for help with equipment and materials provision, with training and policy development as well as other capacity building tools. A few of us who worked alongside Uma for a few years in New South Wales disability organisations want to see if we can help. We’re not really sure what or how. We realise it might be difficult to provide aid to people living in a war zone. We want to provide support but to do so in a way that fosters some kind of purposeful two way exchange because we’re not interested in perpetuating neo-colonialist dependency relationships. We do want to transfer helpful resources from our rich society to the poorer circumstances of Sri Lanka but to do so in ways that change and benefit us somehow, just as we hope we may help people in Uma’s community to change for the better their own circumstances. And, of course, we want to be ‘right on’ (to use a very old and self-deprecating term): carbon neutral, gender balancing, capacity building, local resource and skill developing, sustainable. Are we bleeding heart liberals and do-gooding busy bodies? Probably. We hope to do good (and there's nothing wrong with that) but we’ll plan to do good well. Let's see what happens.