That girl is so pretty!  At the age of ten and on the edge of being a young lady, she is clearly the apple of her Grandfather’s eye.  They obviously have a very close relationship and the plans to send Ruhi to a school in Colombo has been postponed for a year,

and most probably not the last time.  But Roy assured us that she has all opportunities even if she will move in five years. 

There is no way to blame the Grandfather for being so attached to the girl.  He and his wife have had a hard time coping with the loss of their daughter and son-in-law, Ruhi’s parents. In Sri Lanka it is possible to go for O-Level (two years prior to graduation) in all three languages English, Tamil and Singhalese.

 At the beginning of this year Ruhi was supposed to go for the tests to enter the English stream.  On the first date, she had been sick and on the second she had forgotten to go there.  She told us about it in rather fluent English and our outcry “forgotten??” made her come up with the full truth.  She was afraid she would not pass the test with the full score. This would have led her to being in a class with weaker students.  In the Singhalese stream she would be in the best class………….

we think she will find her way around with her kind of ambitions.

She was delighted about the letter and the Swiss drinking bottle from her sponsors.  On a later occasion, we called Christine and Max, but Ruhi was too nervous to say much on the phone.  We haven’t given up the hope to one day witness a personal meeting of the three of them! 

Info to Max:  Along with all kinds of beautiful and exotic animals during our 30 days, we saw only one non-poisonous snake (zero poisonous snakes), two cockroaches (one was dead) and a spider the size of a palm of a hand that did not move.