Having identified the school we wanted, our immediate objective was to get the school to start functioning along with other schools in the island. The Management, Parents, Teachers, Past pupils and students of Gateway together with the school community of the Kannangara School restored the damaged buildings and made sure that the school re-commenced sessions, along with all other schools in the country on the 10 th of January 2005 . To meet our objective, we carried out several “shramadana” campaigns and cleared all the debris by ourselves. The necessary school uniforms, shoes books etc. were provided to all children so that they were able to engage in their studies from the very first week without any interruption.

Later, we signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Ministry of Education (MoE) taking over the responsibility of re-building C . W. W. Kannanagara School . Through the MoU , MoE requested us to provide a number of new facilities that didn’t exist before, to the new school that was to be constructed. Further, the school community too had a number of requests for additional facilities. We took into consideration all requests in the planning and the designing of the new building complex.

Schools, organizations and peoples of all walks of life, both locally and internationally, contributed to the “Gateway Fund for School in need” (at Sampath Bank, Borella -A/C 0004 6000 1463) that was set up to facilitate the re-building process. Gateway’s Directorate initiated the fund with a contribution of one million rupees. The entire Gateway family consisting of the Heads, Teachers, Parents, Past pupils, Administrative & Support staff, Students soon followed with their contributions. While the readers of the Daily Mail UK, made the major contribution there were many schools from UK, USA, Europe, Australia and Africa who joined hands with Gateway for this important venture. In Sri Lanka too, there were many well wishers who joined Gateway in making this project a reality.