Objective of Sri Lanka Project

Since I was not able to upload our presentation about the Sri Lanka, I decided to introduce the process and the current situation of our project in this blog in next several weeks. I hope you will enjoy getting to know our ideas and give us your feedback!

First, I would like to share the purpose of our project. There are two main goals that we would like to achive through this project.


1. Exploring the possibility of creating the age valued community in rural village in Sri Lanka

2. Exploring the mutual benefits through Information exchange

- developed countries: knowledge of long term care for elderly

- developing countries: social value of elder care

Our world established the paternalistic dynamics/attitude that developped part of world would help developping part of world by providing financial, technical, or other support, and slowly loosing the humble attitude of gratitude toward what we are given. Moreover, we are overlooking the wealth of wisdom and social value that have been sustained for centuries in cultually rich countries. When we try to help developing countries, we should be careful not to impose our idea but sincerely listen to what they really need and how we can be helpful to honor their cultual heritage.

Through studying elder care situation in Japan and the United States, I have learned that what elders are seeking is not "things or money," but much more simple things like happiness, relationship, meaning, or legacy, which cannot be measured by monetary value. I strongly believe that it is the time for us to re-visit traditional way of life that people informally help each other in a community. Since our society has lost the sense of community during the shift to capitalistic society, the developing part of the world can teach us social value of community and the meaning of elder care.

This project aim to explore the concept of "inter-dependency," and attempt to maintain the existing community in developing countries, and also examine what part of traditional community lifestyle can be transfered back to developed part of world, such as Japan and the USA. Most importantly, we would like to carefully think about how we as citizens in developed countries can be helpful to improve life of elders in the world.