Enhancing Literacy of Brothers' Langauge is a reconciliation project organized by Sri Lanka Scout Associaiton under the guidance of APR support center and Messengers of Peace inititative.

Building peace and harmony between Sinhala and Tamil speaking communities by breeching the language barrier was the supreme objective of the project. Project was designed in such a way to enhance the language literacy of the other language in both communities to enable the level of communication possible.

On May 18, 2009, Colombo Sri Lanka declared the end of the 26-year civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) separative terrorist movement. It was presented as the beginning of a new era of peace, national reconciliation and development. But for many of those in the north and east of the country, where the worst of the war was experienced, that harmony cannot materialize when so many scars of war remain.

Language barrier was the most important determinant factor, which made the reconciliation process of the country’s Sinhala and Tamil speaking communities less progressive. As a NSO we decided to implement a pilot project, selecting  two scout troops, 50 scouts from each scout troop, one from a remote island called “Nagadeepa” (Which doesn’t have inland transportation with main stream and was affected the civil war) in northern part of the country, with purely Tamil speaking community and the other one from southern part of the country known as “Matara” with purely Sinhala speaking community. The scout troop from Nagadeepa, since they are an island community, was highly isolated from the facilities, commodities and main stream of transportation and also with culture & social activities, which made them complete outsiders of the main stream of Sri Lankan community.

Project was conducted in 2 phases, Jaffna in March 2019 and October 2019 in Matara. 50 scouts from Jaffna and 50 scouts from Matara did two camping programs together along with lot of language training activities according to scout method. Patrols were established as mixed patrols to include scouts from both communities. Campfires, games, sight seeing, language training activities, role plays, discussions, cooking, cutltural shows, home stay program were the main amenties of the project.

Project was a great success since the objectives were achieved and project was concluded by bulding a strong bond between scouts from tamil and Sinhala speaking communities. We recommend to conduct similar project to overcome the language barrier between communities and to build peace and harmony

Social Media Links for the Event are as follows.