University of life – drugs

Public health education is widely seen on social media and schools are trying to promote lots of topics to keep kids and young people safe and healthy, which is great to see.

None-the-less, I was coming back from a grocery shop with the children one afternoon a few days ago, on a busy bustling street, trying to weave through people waiting for bus or taxi, people on their mobile phones standing in the middle of the path (which is half done – or rather, half not done), each building with a security man in front and sometimes with an armed soldier as well, street vendors being busy with customers – and among all this we see two men crouching by the fence wall with one injecting something into the second one’s vein in his inner arm. Kids with their eyes wide open and I had to give them a lesson on drugs for the rest of our way to the apartment with lots of questions to follow.

We knew coming to Sri Lanka would be an adventure and we don’t believe in wrapping our children in cotton wool or avoiding painful truths, but to find the above scene after the bubble of an English countryside village was still a shock.