Beating Dengue
In the early hours of April 19, 2012, the doctors
of the Lady Ridgeway Hospital (LRH) Medical Intensive care (MICU)
were fighting to save the life of my five month baby son Jason,
after having been diagnosed with a severe attack of dengue. It was
the first time LRH-MICU had dealt with such a badly managed dengue
case of a baby in its history, and the job of not only dealing with
this severe dengue attack, but also undoing the damage done due to
the bad management of Jason's dengue, fell into the hands of a
brilliant young paediatrician Dr. Daham de silva who was a Senior
Registrar at the hospital. If not for his out of the box, bold and
aggressive treatment of Jason, with the support of Dr. Srilal de
Silva and Dr. Nalin Kithulwaththa the Head consultants of the MICU,
and God's direct intervention of making the impossible, possible,
Jason my son would have been lost.
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Big power push for Sustainable Development inadequate
Attendance at the Rio Summit on Sustainable
Development has apparently reached phenomenal proportions but the
uncomfortable irony is that some of the world’s foremost leaders are
reportedly giving it a miss. Among the latter are US President
Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and German
Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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Kataragama: shared heritage of Buddhists and Hindus
Kataragama, Kacaragama in Pali, is first
mentioned in the Mahavamsa in relation to the festivities connected
with the planting of the sapling of the Bodhi Tree at Anuradhapura
during the reign of Devanampiya Tissa (250-210 BC). The chronicle
states that the Kshatriyas or the local chieftains of Kataragama
also participated in the ceremony. It is interesting to note that
the text contains the fact that, of the eight saplings which
sprouted out of the original Bo sapling, one was planted at
Kataragama. This reference indicates that a Buddhist ritual centre
had developed at Kataragama from pre-Christian times although it
cannot be located with any degree of certainty.
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The Laws’ Delays
A couple of months back, I wrote in this series
about the Laws’ Delays, but I was talking then of a very different
sort of delay. I was referring to delays in the application of laws,
the manner in which dates are given ad infinitum (endlessly) for
cases, how cases are adjourned sine die (without a date, so that
those who suffer have no idea when they can get closer to justice),
that individuals are remanded with no idea for how long this might
be.
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‘Huge debt owed to Presidential Initiative overlooked’
Teaching Tamil as a second language to Sinhala
students' (Daily News: June 11, 2012: Page 19) is more about
teaching English than about teaching Tamil to Sinhala students.
Describing herself as a lecturer in English at the English Language
Training Unit of the Colombo University, Attanayake takes on the
subject of English teaching in Sri Lanka and its present status
without as much as making a passing reference to the most important
and far reaching initiative taken in this field in Sri Lanka in the
past 100 years or more, namely, the Presidential Initiative, English
as a Life Skill, now popularly known in the country as the 'Life
Skill Programme'.
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