During our stay in Colombo we were invited to visit the headquarters of Sarvodaya, the largest grassroots non-governmental organisation in Sri Lanka. We were welcomed into the buildings which were set in simple, well-kept but beautiful grounds, where we had the opportunity to find out about the various aspects of work done by this large NGO.Since the Tsunami, Sarvodaya has been involved in reconstruction and community support work across the whole of Sri Lanka and they are now active in more than 16000 villages island-wide. We were shown a map that detailed each community the organisation worked with. The most impressive aspect of the organisation for me was the compassion and attention to detail that went into every part of their work. It became obvious that every coloured dot on the map was so much more than a figure in an overall plan. It was with pride that we saw a small red dot on the bottom of the map that represented our village of Rassandeniya near Matara. We knew that there stood a brand new sunshine-yellow building that, in the following weeks, would be filled with smiling faces, teachers, students and community members learning together.Now we had an overall impression of the scale of Sarvodaya’s work we were fascinated to see some of the individual achievements and humanitarian work that happened at the same site, literally alongside the office work. On a hot sticky July afternoon we walked shoeless into the centre for abandoned and malnourished babies where three young nurses watched over two rooms of sleeping babies. During our visit many stirred from their naps to face the midday heat and stared with wide enquiring eyes at the fifteen white faces which looked over them. Every member of our group were touched by what we saw and watched in admiration as Mrs Ariyaratne greeted each child as one of her own. It occurred to me that Sarvodaya had found the perfect combination of the organisation, sustainability of a large national company, but its greatest achievement was the humanity, care and compassion every member of staff put into their work.It was rewarding to see exactly how our funds had been allocated to the community of Rassandeniya and I felt proud to be working alongside Sarvodaya as well as Rotary Sri Lanka and the University of Ruhuna.Our visit concluded with some time in the Ma-Sevana teenage mothers’ home where the staff cared for Sri Lankan girls from the poorest areas who had fallen pregnant through sexual abuse, rape and incest. I felt overwhelmed as our group of fifteen young females from Durham University, who all looked forward to prosperous futures, came face to face with these girls. They were up to nine years our junior and while learning to care for their own babies still had the pigtails and the wide eyed innocence of their early teenage years.It was shockingly real and this first hand meeting with some of the psychologically traumatised child-mothers in Sarvodaya’s care was an inspiring push at the start of our summer in Sri Lanka. If we can teach the people we work with as much as we have learnt from those we met in the first few days, we should look forward to an extremely productive seven weeks.