Good afternoon everyone. It is a great honor for us to be here today. We want to thank Dr K P Hewagamage for inviting us for this event. Let us give you some idea about the evolution of Horizon Lanka.

I am Isuru Senevirathna from Horizon Lanka Foundation in Mahavilachchiya.

I am Krishanthi Priyadarshani from Horizon Lanka Foundation from Mahavilachchiya.

Horizon was born in 1998. Mr. Nandasiri Wanninayaka was our English teacher at Saliyamala School at that time. He had a new way of teaching. He got us to write a journal to improve our English. We wrote the pages by hand and pasted the sheets on the classroom wall. Later this became a printed journal with the first PC and the printer we received from American embassy.

Horizon computer project started with 10 students. We had our classes under the trees. Now there are about hundred students. At the 2004 and 2005 GCE O/L exam, eight students got A grades for English.

In 2001 we designed our first website. It was a very simple one. We received a donation of 15,000 rupees that year. With this money we laid the foundation for a computer lab.

With our website we got a lot of publicity. Many people visited it. You also can visit our website www.horizonlanka.org

We had more publicity in 2003. Some of our children gave a presentation at the Annual National IT conference in Colombo organized by CSSL. Four of us did a one hour live TV show under e@Shanida on Rupavahini.

We completed the computer lab in 2004. We still did not have any internet connection in the village. Then some of our well wishers gave the money to build a tower to access internet. Now the children in Mahavilachchiya have internet access 24 hours a day.

ICT Agency of Sri Lanka has accepted us as a model to expand computer use in other villages in Sri Lanka . ICTA started assisting us with our e-village project from January 2005. They pay our monthly internet bill.

Last December Intel invited Horizon Lanka to do a presentation in Colombo . Three students from Horizon Lanka participated in it. We did the presentation with Dr. Craig R. Barret, the Chairman of Intel. Dr. Barret was happy about us and donated 4 brand new laptops to us.

Mr. Chas Charles and Mrs. Lovina Charles bought a 2 acre land in Mahavilachchiya and built a new building to accommodate a computer lab and a language lab for us in 2006.

USAID and Geneva Global helped us to buy the equipment needed for the computer lab and the language lab.

We run around 10 ICT related programs in the village. All the programs are run by the students and the villagers with the guidance from the Horizon Lanka. You can download the 15 Mb Flash file of this presentation by Clicking Here.