WHY NOT SRI LANKA? සිංහල

I live abroad

How you can help Sri Lanka from where you are

You do not have to move home to make a difference. The book shows three ways in for a Sri Lankan abroad: with a network, with money, or by coming home. Each one comes with the ideas that suit it.

Ways to help from where you are

The single most valuable thing a Sri Lankan in Melbourne or Zurich can do for a producer at home is to be the first order and the first honest review.

Twelve of the book's 500 ideas, chosen for a Sri Lankan abroad. Each one is a business somebody at home can run, and you are its customer, its mentor, its investor or its first order.

A carpenter talking to a mentor by video in his workshop

With an hour a month and what you know

A worker checking a delivery of Sri Lankan goods abroad

As the first customer

A nurse visiting an elderly person on a sunny veranda

For your parents

A manager showing investors round a spice workshop

With your savings

Children writing letters in a sunny Saturday school classroom

For your children

Two doctors walking a sunlit hospital corridor in Kandy

With your profession

Three ways in, from the book

From the book

If you are abroad with a network and no money

You are the customer, the quality inspector and the distributor for clusters 3, 5, 6, 10, 11 and 18, and for everything in Sri Lanka House. The single most valuable thing a Sri Lankan in Melbourne or Zurich can do for a producer at home is to be the first order and the first honest review. That is the keep-the-customer rule with the customer on the other side of the world. Cluster 17 is yours too: your parents are the customer.

All 150 ideas

From the book

If you are abroad with money

Clusters 1, 4, 6, 8, 12, 13 and 21 are the ones that need capital before they need anything else: the lodges, the balloon, the roastery, the processing plant, the laboratory, the marina, the solar leases. Bring the standard with the money.

All 145 ideas

From the book

If you are coming home

All of it, and Cluster 28 first. The country has never lacked people who can do these things. It has lacked people who have seen them done to the world's standard and know what that looks like. That is what you are bringing back, and it is worth more than the savings.

All 500 ideas

Where Sri Lankans abroad come in

A plain navy passport with no emblem and a blank boarding card lying on an old leather suitcase, one soft light

18

Sri Lankans abroad, both directions

1.5 million people abroad who know how rich countries work, and who send home money and little else.

20 ideas, 361 to 380
A stethoscope coiled on a dark table beside an old telephone and a cup of tea, warm lamplight

17

Health, care and the parents of Sri Lankans abroad

Sri Lankans abroad have parents at home whom they cannot look after from Melbourne. They will pay, and the money stays.

20 ideas, 341 to 360
The open front door of an old house, warm light spilling out onto a veranda, an old leather suitcase on the threshold, dusk

28

Coming home

The first one through pays the whole price, and everyone after walks through an open door. These are the doors.

5 ideas, 496 to 500

Chapter Sixteen. The Bridge

Bridges already exist between Sri Lanka and Britain, Switzerland, Japan, the United States, Australia, Canada and the Gulf, carrying people and money and goods, almost all of it one way. The chapter asks, for each, what institution already in existence could make it run back.

Chapter Sixteen in the book · Sri Lanka House

What other countries did

A fridge by a Swiss country road with its door open: cheese, milk and eggs inside and a cash box on the post beside it

Switzerland

In parts of rural Switzerland, a farm will put a small refrigerator at the edge of the property, by the road. There is nobody there. There is no camera.

Ch. Six
Small electric taxis in the main street of Zermatt, with visitors and their suitcases

Zermatt

You cannot drive into Zermatt. And the taxis themselves are worth a paragraph, because they were not a policy. They were a family.

Ch. Five
Sugar cane fields in Mauritius with workers at the harvest and green volcanic mountains behind

Mauritius

An economist who went on to win the Nobel Prize studied it, and wrote that it would probably fail. It reached high income in 2020.

Ch. Ten
A fjord harbour in Norway with a supply ship at the quay and engineers walking past

Norway

A cold northern country that worked out the rules for its oil before the oil money arrived, which turns out to be the entire trick.

Ch. Eleven
A Danish dairy farm in summer, cows on flat green fields and an old brick creamery

Denmark

A nation of dairy farmers who became wealthy because somebody in the 1880s thought carefully about who ought to own the creamery.

Ch. Eleven
Pickers at work under the vines of a kiwifruit orchard in New Zealand

New Zealand

New Zealand grows kiwifruit. So do Italy, Chile, Greece and a dozen other countries. New Zealand earns something else, and the reason is a law.

Ch. Eleven
A busy Dublin street in the morning, people walking to work past Georgian houses

Ireland

Within a decade the country that had exported its young for a century was gaining people again.

Ch. Fourteen
An inspector checking finished cups one by one in a small Japanese pottery workshop

Japan

In 1950 "Made in Japan" meant cheap and shoddy. Within a generation Japanese goods had a new name abroad, built with tools that cost almost nothing.

Ch. Eleven
Three hardcover copies of Why Not Sri Lanka? in a stack

The book behind the list

Each idea comes from the argument of the book: what Sri Lanka already has, why it leaves, and what other countries did about the same problem.

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