At present we are involved in the Orientation Programme for new students from April 18^th and May 19^th and also we have been out and about visiting some of out current students on their field work. We both attended an All Day Faculty Meeting on April 21^st .It has taken Rosemary as long (10 hours) to write up the minutes as the meeting.

People in Britain keep asking us if we are winding down. Sadly this is not possible, due to the crisis situation in which TCL finds itself. The new Principal is keen to use whatever we can offer and James, in particular, has enough work to last him 12 months. In fact, James is busier than ever before and under quite a lot of pressure.

However hard it is going to be to leave, time waits for no-one and we have just planned our farewell to Kandy Methodist Church and Circuit in June. Although TCL has been the main focus of our lives here in Sri Lanka, we have played our part in Kandy Methodist Church/ Circuit. Rosemary has attended many meetings, made more tedious by the language issues. She has played the piano often in the church and taken many services. Indeed, with Maggie on furlough in Britain, Rosemary is now the only pianist for the English speaking congregation, so has been playing and preaching. One other pianist has had a stroke. Another returned to the Anglican Church. The Sinhala congregation fares better. (The Tamil congregation meets in another church in another part of town). In Holy Week Rosemary took her first full thanksgiving service, since she left England - for our friend Joan Cooray, who died peacefully on March 14^th aged 87, having had cancer for a while. We had spent part of Christmas Days 2006-9 with her and had visited her quite often since she had become housebound. Holy Week was a good preparation for the future as she also took services on Good Friday and Easter Day, and a service in the TCL Chapel to commence the ministry of our new Principal, Rev. Dr. Jerome Sahabandhu, pictured in the last newsletter. He will be very good. It is a real shame that TCL is at such a crisis with its lack of faculty.

Rosemary’s last church engagement in Sri Lanka will be the Central District Synod weekend in mid-June. By then we hope to have completed our farewells to special people and places.

While folks in Britain are now involved in an election campaign, our hearts and minds are still engaged with politics here. (We do have a proxy vote for May 6^th and will of course be interested in the results.) On a recent visit to Jaffna, we saw the incongruity of the Buddhist temple on the island of Nagadeepa (now attracting many Sinhalese tourists) portraying President Mahinda Rajapakse as a King/ God. We mentioned this trait in our last newsletter. The April 8^th General Election has given him a majority in parliament which is nearly sufficient to change the constitution, namely, 144 seats out of 225. A few "cross-overs" and he will get the two thirds he needs. His elder brother is already Speaker, his other two brothers are in the cabinet and his son is an MP. There are four Christian MPs; three are in the main opposition party (UNP) and the fourth, a prominent human rights lawyer, is in the TNA (the Tamil National Alliance). He also happens to be a well-known Methodist lay person.

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Our visit to Jaffna (12-17 April) was a most moving experience and we will write more fully about it in our June 2010 newsletter. We in Kandy escaped the ravages of war - it was really just a mild inconvenience to us – but our drive through the Wanni area to Jaffna itself provided scenes of frightening devastation. We met people whose lives have been blighted by war and heard some very poignant stories. Everyone we met was both exhausted by the war and relieved now to be living in peace after nearly 30 years of conflict.

At the time of writing (Saturday May 1^st) we are anxious about the state of health of one our TCL workers who fell from a roof on Friday April 30^th and sustained back injuries. Mr Piyaratne is a good and loyal college worker with a lovely smile. He is a single parent with 4 children. He is in hospital and may have damaged his spinal cord.

We wrote last time of our students raising money for Haiti-81,000 rupees (£480) was raised for Christian Aid. This really has gone down as a TCL milestone because no-one recalls them ever having raised money for a cause outside Sri Lanka. So this is a positive note on which to end our time here. Links with Zambia have helped the students to understand themselves as part of a bigger world.

But it has not all been work. We did have an evening out with some local friends on James’s 50^th Birthday on Friday April 23^rd

We continue to be very grateful to Janet Bull for all that she does for us. There will be just two more newsletters after this one: June and August 2010. From 1/9/2010 a very different life beckons us. We are very aware of all that we are going to miss about Sri Lanka. As this newsletter is being written, there are the sounds of the Asian Koel bird in the background. It is known here as the New Year Cuckoo (a reference to the Tamil/Sinhala New Year of 13/14 April each year). There were a couple of green parrots on the field near our house this morning. A gecko crawls up the wall, the sunshine pours in and it is lovely and warm - although we have had many heavy tropical storms this month which have given James extra work with the TCL computers. It is May Day and a Public Holiday here (Sri Lanka has more such days than any other country in the world!) and we are going to have a break from work and go off for a swim –outdoors of course!

In this newsletter we have repeatedly referred to the crisis situation in which TCL finds itself. It is hard for us to leave it at this time. Sadly the UEM minister from Tanzania mentioned in our December newsletter is unable to come. However, we are hopeful of a minister coming from India (the CSI) who has a PhD in the New Testament. As it stands at the moment, after Rosemary leaves, there is no-one left here to teach NT.

Our friend Jenny Hulin (VSO Volunteer) who has been a good companion since we met her in November 2008 is leaving Sri Lanka in early June. We have much enjoyed the times we have spent with her and she too now faces transition and, like James, a job hunt.

We have really appreciated those of you who have kept in personal touch with us over the last 5 years, and also very glad of those friends who have come to see us in situ.

We ask for prayers/thoughts for all the people mentioned in this newsletter and, in addition, for continuing prayers for all those who are victims of the war: the homeless, injured and bereaved, and for those still in the internally displaced people’s camps, and for those ministering to them. We also remember those who are missing Joan Cooray, especially her daughter Shantini and grandson Jamie.

Newsletter back copies are on our website together with a large number of pictures of our life in Sri Lanka: See www.rosemaryandjames.methodistchurch.co.uk.