As we approach our eighth and final week in Pelena West we’re left wondering where on earth the last seven have gone.It’s been a complete whirlwind of an experience, constantly busy both with our planned activities and unplanned social occasions at which our presence seems always to be expected! We’ve got too many invites for days that we’ve got left now so without a doubt the days will just fly by. This week we had breakfast at the house of one of our close friends, Nilanthi – a mother of one of the pre-school children and also our most enthusiastic member of the mother’s English class. It was an honour to help her cook and there was rather a veritable feast at the end of it! We felt full for the rest of the day, and fortunately we weren’t asked to dance after we’d eaten!The numbers in the after-school club have continued to rise, peaking on Thursday with over 60 children. It was a special day, not only for the number of children who were there but also because it marked the start of some outreach activities. Elderly members of the community had been invited to the school for an afternoon’s entertainment. The children performed a mix of Sinhala and Tamil songs and dances and some highly amusing dramas – one of which seemed to revolve around a magic elephant! The visitors were served a sweet cup of ginger tea and some biscuits while watching the show and it was nice for us to meet some of the children’s grandparents. Further activities in the after-school club this week included painting murals on both the inside and the outside of the pre-school’s second floor. Some of the paintings were extremely artistic…others less so (!) but it is now a beautiful, child-friendly space. Friday brought an entertaining sports session where, among other things, we played a game they called ‘flag trees’; it seemed to involve a lot of running, a bit of chasing, and general chaos but even by the end we’d not really grasped the rules. We ran with them anyway.The next one and a half weeks look set to be as jam-packed as the last few – with continued English classes and after-school club alongside plans for our next community day on Saturday and rehearsals for a big cultural show on our last evening in the village; hopefully the practice that we’ve had entertaining people in their houses with our energetic ‘English dancing’ and singing will pay off in the final showdown! One of the striking things of this year’s experience is the openness with which people talk about the tsunami. It has been humbling to realise the individual’s capacity for resilience as people have described their experiences and heartbreaking losses. The longer that we stay here, however, the more we realise that our initial impressions of peace and harmony are not always what they seem. It’s tempting to look through rose tinted spectacles and see the village as the perfect place we want it to be, but to do so would be ignorant, and would do disservice to some individuals who are striving for a better community. Just as any other place there are tensions and there is a divide between the Sinhala and Muslim communities. That is not to say that they live as two entirely separate communities and there is hope among some for greater integration. It is hoped that the forthcoming community day may take a step in the direction of unity; a potential realization of the actual size of the village (which is far greater than we first believed!) and the people that are all entitled to the communal space at its heart. Of course it’s unlikely to be ground breaking, but amidst the fun and games both in the school building and on the beach, perhaps there is hope for some seeds of understanding. Rosamund Bale