Friday in Colombo, Sri Lanka -- a 17 year old girl made me cry...

 Today was a jam-packed day, so this is gonna be a long story. Read on…

I started my day with a fantastic breakfast buffet on the verandah of the Galle Face Hotel.

These flowers were in the lobby. I saw this growing in Nepal a few days ago. I think it is a "Bird of Paradise?"

We loaded onto the top deck of this bus for a tour of the city of Colombo.

We stopped at this Lotus Flower Tower that has just been erected. The views from the top were great. It is over 1000' tall but the elevator takes you to the top in 43 seconds!

These school children were also visiting the tower.

We drove by the Air Force HQ.

This is interesting architecture.

We stopped at a big Buddhist temple and monastery. I took off my shoes and hat to enter. I saw this HUGE statue. I must have seen 1000 buddha statues today of all different sizes --with this being the largest. Sri Lanka is a mostly Buddhist country. Second is Catholicism, followed by Hindu, Muslim and other Christian sects. We also visited a huge national museum today which had a lot of Buddhist stuff. I always thought Buddhism was such a nice and peaceful religion, but I'm learning that it is as crazy as all of the other religions of the world -- with silly iconography, worship rituals and using spirituality to control its followers (and to generate $$). For such a supposedly peace-practicing religion, it seems that lots of wars and violence have transpired in Sri Lanka in the name of Buddha... hypocrisy?

Supposedly this Buddhist "Stupa" has 2 "relics" of the Lord Buddha. It has his collarbone and his "upper left jaw tooth."

I thought this tree was cool. There are some really huge trees of this variety throughout the city.

We had lunch back at the hotel. This was my beverage and my dessert. The dessert included passion fruit -- which I had never before eaten. It was tasty & sweet.

After lunch we visited a saari shop so the women could acquire saaris for tomorrow's DCI graduation ceremony. The fabrics in this shop were spectacular. Saaris here cost as little as $9 US.

This was the street outside the saari shop.

I sat in the back of our afternoon bus.

Next we went to Dental Care International (DCI). Yesterday's blog post briefly introduced this charitable organization -- and today I witnessed it firsthand. Here we were warmly greeted at the front gate.

This is the classroom for the 10 dental assisting students.

This is one student's assignment pictorially describing a root canal. These are free-hand drawings! My endo residents couldn't draw this well!

There are 10 newly enrolled students who will live and study here for 1 year. The 10 from the last batch will graduate at a ceremony tomorrow. There are 4 faculty members. The students and the faculty all live here, including maybe 4 recent graduates who continue to live here too. In this photo, we were given an overview of the program and each student briefly introduced themselves. None of these young women completed their schooling and most have horribly tragic backgrounds. Tomorrow we will visit the children's home from where many of these girls came. In addition to learning dental assisting skills, they also learn life skills, English, and mathematics. When each girl introduced herself, she expressed her gratitude for being received into this program. More than that, some were extremely emotional about how incredibly grateful they are for receiving this life-altering training opportunity. This opportunity has opened a door for them which will permanently change their lives. The emotional remarks of one17-year-old, brought a flood of tears to my eyes. Even now, I am a bit choked up as I am writing about it. The fact that this program has now graduated 100 young women, amazes me. I have incredible respect for the work of Dr. McClellan, her DCI board members, and her financial benefactors. They have transformed the lives of those 100 women.

The facility has this newly equipped clinical training room.

DCI leases this house for around $550 per month. DCI recently remodeled the kitchen.

This is a bedroom for the faculty.

This is one of two bedrooms for the students.

This is one of the bathrooms.

Each girl has a "caddy" of stuff for their use in the bathroom.

The yard has some interesting plants, including this banana tree.

And this papaya tree.

And this jackfruit tree.

Before leaving, we had tea -- and they served jackfruit. I had never tried jackfruit before. It was meaty and sweet with a huge pit in each yellow morsel.

When I returned to the hotel, I ordered a hamburger. It was my first beef since leaving the US almost 2 months ago. I was thoroughly disappointed and only ate maybe 1/3 of it. Have I lost my appetite for red meat? Or was this just a bland burger?