Meet the Man Fighting to Give Sri Lanka's Tea Pluckers an Education

The narrow street that winds through the seemingly endless tea plantations in Haputale, Sri Lanka, is lined with big signs displaying inspirational sayings. Every few hundred meters, there's a new one: "The fate of animals is indissolubly connected with the fate of men," reads one. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has," reads another. "Let us be them." It seems like sad irony that these signs should exist in a place like this, where the tea pluckers slave away for hours in the fields to make a barely livable wage.

Sri Lanka exports over $1.5 billion worth of tea annually, and Haputale, a small town in the hills, is the epicenter of tea production. Situated on a high mountain ridge, the town is home to about 5,000 people, who are mostly Muslims and Hindus (the majority of Sri Lankans are Buddhist).

While tea is one of Sri Lanka's most lucrative exports, the tea pluckers make around $6 per day (that's after a recent wage hike). A working day lasts about nine hours, and many tea pluckers walk between two and four hours each day just to get to the plantations. There is no social security, healthcare, or pension provided by the companies.

Many of the tea pluckers' children leave school by the time they're 13 or 14 to start working in the fields with their families, according to Promodh Dias, a tea plucker's son who dropped out of school himself as a child."Parents sometimes have trouble raising money for school books, uniforms, or even for the school bus fare," he said—and so instead of going to school, the children join their parents in the fields.

Dias knows there's little he can do to change the working conditions for the tea pluckers, something other organizations are already committed to doing. So instead, he's spent the past several years personally working to secure better educational opportunities for the tea pluckers' children, including vocational training and specialized courses, by raising money and partnering with local nonprofits. At the very least, he wants to ensure that every child has the chance to finish secondary school.

His family runs a small guesthouse between the city of Haputale and a big tea factory. Westerners often stay there, and he takes the opportunity to ask for donations for his one-man charity operation. Though his funding is meager, Dias regularly visits schools in the area and talks with the principals and teachers to find out which students are notably absent or have trouble keeping up in school. He then visits these children's parents to find out about the nature of their problems—usually, he told me, there's just not enough money, or there may be health issues in the family—and doles out financial assistance from the donations he's raised from tourists and friends. The money goes toward keeping the kids in school while their parents work.

Parallel to Dias's work, there are other efforts to improve educational opportunities for the next generation. The Robin Hood Laptop Project offers computers to kids who otherwise wouldn't have the technological literacy to escape the plantations, and even some tea plantations have made their own efforts to provide educational opportunities to the tea pluckers' children, like Fair Trade gardens in India, which require children stay in school until graduation.

But even when kids manage to show up to school each day, the local schools have their own problems. M. Kanagaraj, the principal of one school in Haputale, explained on a recent visit: "We are a rural school. We don't have any facilities, no computers, no laptops. We are very happy when someone from outside comes and helps us."

The principal's office was divided down the middle by a row of lockers; on the other side was a classroom full of kids, and Dias was talking to their teacher. The building was small and cramped, and each classroom accommodated at least two, sometimes even three, different grades. "This is our playground," Kanagaraj said, pointing toward a patch of dusty brown earth.

"The biggest problem, in my opinion, is that the parents are uneducated and cannot support their children [with the schoolwork]," said S. Kisho Kumar, who teaches English at another rural school three miles outside Haputale. There are almost 400 children at this school, and even though a new building—which was funded in equal parts by a local nonprofit and the rural community—was recently constructed, there is still not enough space nor teaching material to create an adequate atmosphere for proper education.

If he can raise enough money, Dias hopes to build up a "skills development center" in the community, where the local kids can take vocational classes in order to have an alternative to working on the plantations. For now, he's personally offering some classes on his own and finding partners who will take the kids on as apprentices.

While the working conditions of the tea pluckers might not change, Dias is hopeful that the next generation will have a brighter future. "Education is the most important thing to get out of this misery," he told me, sounding a little like one of those inspirational signs outside of the tea plantations.