Today I was very happy to see the post about “Village Bloggers” in “Chilliad minds” blog. Please visit http://chiliad-minds.blogspot.com/2007/11/boom-of-village-bloggers.html to read the original post. This is very encouraging. When I first introduced Mahavilachchiya kids and kids from few other villages to blogging sometime back I was in a dilemma as to how would the others look at the kids’ imperfect English. (No one speaks perfect English.) I was kind of scared when I asked them to submit their blogs to Kottu as I feared that the kind of bloggers and visitors of Kottu will ask Indi to remove these kids’ blogs as the kids’ English is not perfect. But today I saw Chiliad minds’ post in Kottu and it is encouraging to see that there are people who are looking at things in a positive way as well. Thanks for encouraging these village bloggers. As Chiliad minds suggests please leave a comment or two in their blogs. Also we need to have volunteers to correct young bloggers’ English as well. If any volunteer is ready for this please email me at wanni@horizonlanka.org and I will introduce bloggers from the villages to you. They can send you posts in MS Word and you can use “Track Changes” in MS Word to correct the mistakes so that the kids can understand where they go wrong. Once corrected, you can email the posts back to the relevant student and he can upload the corrected version. This is kind of e-mentoring. (All communication will be cc’ed to the relevant computer center manager in each village and communication will take place under his/her supervision to avoid unnecessary problems.) Please help these students in villages who are struggling with little resources to learn.
Now that these bloggers have seen how blogs work and understood the fundamentals of it, I will encourage them to write on more interesting issues rather than writing about more or less the same subjects. They may need some more time for it. What is exciting about blogging is that these kids who were hesitating to write essays when their English teachers asked them to write in public schools have taken it directly to blogging!!! Hope this will be a revolution in English teaching in rural villages of Sri Lanka soon.
Nanda Wanninayaka 
Your welcome Wanni, count me in. I could spare some time to give them a boost in English. May be my wife too will pitch in. Will let you know. I am also trying to get a project where SL students can interact with Swedish students. Will let you know how it goes, my fired is still looking for funding for the project.
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I think the kids are doing a fantastic job of just writing – without being afraid/self conscious about their English language skills. Its a big first step.
I’d be happy to volunteer and help them via MS word attachments (will email you separately on that). I’m not an English teacher though so I think it might be handy to post some guide lines for volunteers.
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I really believe what these kids are at the moment is a huge investment to their future. Thinking about all the bad stuff that’s roaming in the internet, it’s so nice to see a bunch of kids utilizing it in the way it was meant to be.
I , for one, enjoy their blogs so much. A few months back I even wrote a post about it. I think what Chiliad Minds said is very true. No one is perfect in english and personally, i don’t think anyone should ever try to be perfect.
Anyway, as for Mr. Wanninayaka’s request, I’d be glad to help out when ever I can. Busy but will find time to do something if it is called for. You can reach me at nirosilva@gmail.com
By the way, I have gathered some friends and we have almost finished building community website for the bloggers in Sri Lanka. It was supposed to end in late august, but as with any other software project, it missed its deadlines:) I’m hoping to add a section dedicated to teenagers in due time. Hopefully, I’ll be able to host the site before the end of this month.
Anyway, keep up the good work.
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