| Nishantha Wickramasinghe, SPA ’02
Within days of the tsunami that devastated his island nation, Nishantha Wickramasinghe was working around the clock with other members of his government to assess the damage and alleviate the suffering of his fellow Sri Lankans. “I will never be able to forget what I have seen and heard,” says the 27-year-old AU alum. One image seared in his memory: the 12-year-old orphan he found drying a single surviving photo of family members the boy had buried with his own hands. Wickramasinghe is the youngest private secretary to a cabinet minister in Sri Lanka. Even before the disaster, his cell phone would start ringing at dawn, and the calls wouldn’t stop until midnight. “A typical day for me has no definition of time,” says Wickramasinghe. Yet before he came to AU, he never considered a career in public service. It was his fellow students who changed his mind. “Living in Washington, D.C., it was impossible to ignore government and politics and the amount of enthusiasm the students at AU had about them . . . [That discovery] took me to the doorsteps of SPA.” Now every letter, petition, and project proposal that goes to the minister of constitutional affairs and national integration is channeled through the former CLEG major. That puts the recent graduate at the center of his nation’s political landscape, since his ministry is entrusted with such crucial tasks as implementing peace-building measures to ensure that Sri Lanka has a chance to heal from its long conflict between the government and separatist Tamil rebels. His job, quite simply, is “to ensure that the life of my minister,” D. E. W. Gunasekera, “goes as smoothly as possible . . . The job itself is very exciting and demanding. I get to exchange ideas with the most helpless to the most powerful persons in the country, increase my knowledge, and do my best to help my countrymen.” It wouldn’t be happening without AU. “The experience gathered at AU really prepared me for my present job,” he says. “It would be doing severe injustice if I was to mention just a few professors: I owe a great deal of thanks to each and every professor I had classes with at AU.”
—Sally Acharya top |
