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| Tuesday, 6 July 2004 |
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Australia honours Lorna Wright : enhancing the civic life of Sri Lanka by Susil Sirivardena and Leo Fonseka
The Government of Australia recently conferred the Order of Australia to a Sri Lanka-born Australian woman who has given the best of her time sans ten years to the women, youth, urban poor and the conflict-affected poor of Sri Lanka. We fervently wish that the Government of Sri Lanka and its civil society too would learn from her outstanding example and multiply her work. The contribution of Ms Lorna Wright to enhance the civic life of Sri Lanka, particularly the women, for over fifty years has been immense. She works at many different levels. Women of all walks of life are her parish. Lorna loved Sri Lanka to return to it after ten years of productive domicile in Australia. She loves Sri Lanka and its people. She calls its unemployed youth 'lovable disruptors'. Pioneering the Housewives' Association In an unyielding economy, she believes home level savings are as important as new earnings. Her regular radio broadcasts and the Home Management page of Ceylon Observer that she edited in the 1950s guided the Sri Lanka housewife in that direction.
Guided by Dr. Mary Ratnam and assisted by many others, she founded the Ceylon Housewives Association, where she was the founding President. Shaping national policy on public housing The pioneering role she played in shaping the national policy on public housing is little known but, is recorded in detail in the biographical notes - 'No. Cousin, I'll to Fife" - of the late Victor L. Wirasinha. According to him, one day, a visitor unknown to him before, 'but now the most unforgettable character I have known', came to him with a proposition. She asked for special dispensation for public servants in the Kandy Kachcheri to obtain a salary loan to buy land and build own homes. Deeply impressed by her argument for it, Wirasinha took her straightaway to Sir Kanthiah Vaithianathan, the Minister of Housing. Lorna argued: "why can't the Financial Regulations permit two-year salary loans for land and housing when you already give loans for purchase of vehicles? The former appreciates in value and in the latter the value is depreciating the moment you buy it." Wirasinha says the Minister was similarly impressed and gave approval in principle. Spurred by Lorna's thinking, soon a public policy on public servants' housing was in the making and today, thousands of public servants who benefit from it do not know that a young, 'crazy' woman was behind it. Engineering the Watapuluwa housing scheme Soon, Lorna and her friends formed the Kandy Public Servants' Building Society and the Hancock Estate was acquired with the consent of the owner and the Watapuluwa. Housing Scheme, the first ever public servants' housing scheme in the country was born. Wirasinha says that 'the project was initiated with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of speed after what Mrs. Wright later told me was a spanner in the works by malcontents which, however, was neatly removed through her own diplomacy'. Lorna and husband, Raine, did not accept the plot of land allotted to them because they did not want to be seen as benefitting from the project. That plot was given to the next on the original list of 231 families. Good if today's leaders too can follow the example. The Watapuluwa scheme stands today as a living monument to her foresight, organisational ability and indomitable spirit. Sunday Observer in June 1955 reporting the launching of the scheme said, 'A single person, Mrs. Lorna Wright had made that scheme realisable'. The scheme was soon followed by a housing programme for minor employees of the government. Lorna proudly says, "Today, many of them are millionaires". "Give one a house, she will soon learn to prosper," she says. An interesting facet of Lorna's life is that most of her tasks were self-assumed. When many keep on cursing the darkness, Lorna tries to light at least one candle. When she read in the newspapers in December 2003 that 263 youth had been arrested in mid seas and retained in the Detention Camp in Kalutara for trying to emigrate illegally to Italy, Lorna took it upon herself to spend own money and energy to meet lawyer, journalists and also travel several times to the Kalutara camp, talk to the detainees and their family members and represent them in various parleys arguing that vocational training not detention should be the punishment. She opined that the former is a consumption cost that drains out the limited government funds while the latter is an investment that equips them with marketable knowledge and skills. Who can argue against such reasoning? Yet, the judicial system in Sri Lanka is slow to conduct the necessary changes in their statutes to make stumbling blocks into stepping stones for youth development. Lorna continued to espouse the cause of these youth and did not relent until they received a reprieve from the President in May 2004. Back in Colombo from Australia, she helped the La Sallian brothers develop one of the most accomplished vocational training and character formation centres for young women and men in the country. V. L. Wirasinha, the inestimable civil servant, wrote in his memoirs, "Lorna's dedication to her self-assumed tasks was infectious not only in Watapuluwa scheme but also in various other projects she has undertaken from time to time... I have in mind, in particular, her nutrition projects - the 'kolakenda' project, pooh-poohed by the members of the upper classes as being 'goday' or rural or peasant but recognised by sensible nutritionists and by school principals as being most beneficial to children... Most conspicuous has been her achievements in recent years in association with the La Sallian Community Education Services, almost entirely of her own devising... Hers has been and continues to be a life of selfless dedication in Christ to those whom she ministers. She has been architect, engineer, foreman and cook much of the time." Lorna has been a lovable rebel and a powerful voice for the voiceless and the disadvantaged. Her struggle has been to create new spaces where they did not exist before. Her uncanny intuition and womanly spirituality led her to think in ways that an utterly conventional society so concerned about external appearances does not care to look at. Therefore, it is in the realm of ideas - of innovative, cost-effective, and utterly doable ideas - that her battles have been fought. From organising housewives as 'aware consumers,' from housing the middle classes, and public servants when they had not been thought of before, to kola kenda and hath maalu which have now acquired policy level respectability, to the possibility of income cum dignity to the lovable disrupters through the principles of Ath Udawwa or apprenticeship in the construction sector, to building hearths and kitchens, in Vavuniya, Mannar and Hambantota, and sustained advocacy for the MOM or Memory of Mother Foundation, Lorna has been an exemplary and invaluable commitment to the cause of the poor and voiceless of her beloved Sri Lanka. The fact that the Australian Government has conferred a national honour on an Australian citizen whose work and service has been in and for Sri Lanka, says a great deal about the positive scope for hybridities which have been so much a part of our civilisational culture. We do hope that moment of celebration would result in a first class biography of Lorna. |
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