News stories by Amantha Perera, page 20

Ask any Sri Lankan, and he or she will cringe at the mention of ‘water hyacinth’, infamous in the country, where it is called by its more common Sri Lankan name ‘Japan Jabbara’. The weed-like water plant has spread across the island, and everyone knows its potential to take over any watery home in double quick time.

It is a story that spans three islands, across the breadth of the Indian Ocean. That is, of hundreds of boat people sailing the rough seas in unseaworthy vessels, risking life and limb in their desperate attempt at a new lease of life.

Sudarma Senevirathana’s teenage daughter is at an age when she can already be given the ‘rubella’ vaccine, administered free of charge by government health officials at schools.

When the European Union announced last year that it was seeking an investigation into alleged human rights violations in Sri Lanka as a precondition for extending concessionary tariff rates for exports from the island state, the government promptly cried foul.

Well before 1.7 million voters trooped to 1,485 polling stations on Oct. 10 to elect the 55 members of the Southern Provincial Council, it was a foregone conclusion that President Mahinda Rajapakasa would easily lead his United People Freedom Alliance (UPFA) government as the clear winner.

As the world awaits with bated breath the much-anticipated outcome of the upcoming Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December, the impact of which will reverberate across the globe, Sri Lanka, like many other countries, has been reeling under sharply contrasting weather conditions.

Dennawa is a typical rural Sri Lankan agriculture village, located deep in the dry zone. Behind the houses made of dry brick stretch the fields where villagers tend vegetables and fruit plantations.

The room is dingy and cramped. The walls are unplastered and its rough cement edges can scrape the skin easily. Furniture is strewn all over the place, plastic chairs stacked one on top of the other, boxes on top of them, handbags hanging from the wall and clothes on a rack. A small kerosene cooker is kept on the side of the room while a bicycle is parked next to the only bed in the 10-by-10-feet room.

It is a walk that no one has taken in the last quarter of a century. The nation having been beset by a bloody sectarian war, who would have thought of travelling the length of Sri Lanka south to north, let alone walk the distance, in the name of peace?

By all accounts, 14-year-old student Anuthara Jayawardene was an unobtrusive child. But her death, by hanging herself inside a toilet in her school premises on July 22, has brought her right into the middle of media attention. Her name and the circumstances surrounding her death are now at the centre of a public dust storm.