Starter Kit. Idea 198 of 500. Cluster 9
Translation and booking services offered to temples, so that a monk never has to handle the arrangements
The mechanism, from the book
What cannot be copied. Every competitor can build a beach hotel. No competitor can offer a Buddhist tradition more than 2,000 years old, still practised at the places where it first took root on the island.
The first step
Offer one temple's lay committee a month of free help: answer its foreign emails, keep an English calendar of Poya days and events, and translate the notice board. Log every enquiry, every visitor and every hour a monk did not have to spend on logistics. At the end of the month, ask the committee what that work is worth to them and whether they will introduce you to a second temple. The proof is the log and a referral.
- Who pays first
- A temple's lay committee, paying from donations it already receives, because foreign enquiries are rising and no monk should be answering them.
- What leaves today
- Temples that could host the world go unfound online, and the monks who should be teaching are pulled into admin or turn visitors away.
Ask first
- Department of Cultural Affairs. Ask whether temples have ever asked them for help with foreign visitors.
- Data Protection Authority. Ask what you must do to hold visitors' booking details safely for a temple.
Check before you spend
Whether the lay committee agrees in writing to what you may say and promise on the temple's behalf, and how bookings and personal details stay safe.
Find out these three numbers
- How many foreign emails or calls does one temple get in a month?
- What would a lay committee pay, if anything, for the service?
- How many temples could one person serve well?
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.