Fifth death anniversary of Sri Lanka’s leading
nursing educationist:
Blazing a trail: purpose project of Chandra
Sanja de Silva Jayatilleka
Trixie Marthenez’s book Those Delhi Days (1950-54) tells part of the
story. Chandra Samarasinghe was barely out of her teens when she set off
to New Delhi from Colombo in 1950, to start a new chapter in her life.
She had dreamed of becoming a doctor and was studying for her University
Entrance exams but there she was sitting in a train with the two other
Ceylonese girls who had been selected together with her, for four years
at one of Asia’s leading Universities to do an honours degree, having
won the coveted scholarships on offer beating a room full of
extravagantly dressed applicants. Leaving Ceylon and heading off to a
new country, a new way of life, she was soon to introduce herself to her
Delhi classmates with a proudly delivered I am from Lanka.
They were the post colonial generation of young Ceylonese women,
preparing to take over from the British, and as their lecturers in New
Delhi advised them, to maintain and improve on colonial standards.
They were excited at the prospect of adventure, but already homesick.
Their motivation was high; the girls got on well and it promised to be a
wonderful four years of academic success and exuberant enjoyment of
University life away from home (but not too far to pop back for
holidays). Her friend Trixie was to remember that Chandra regarded
Tagore as her favourite poet and that her treasured statue of Gandhi
entrusted to another friend to bring back to Sri Lanka safely, arrived
broken.
Chandra was the third child of Peter Lionel Arthur Samarasinghe and
his wife Rosalyn. Rosalyn liked to play the piano, the piano accordion,
sing and dance and Peter liked to sing along with her.
He was a proud man, who had found the love of his life in his wife
and was devastated at her passing away when his younger daughter Chandra
was only 11 months old. There were many evenings of songs from the old
days at Trinity College, Kandy, where he and all four of his brothers
were schooled, and his son Nissanka would continue to keep the old
school flag flying musically, for many decades to come.
Chandra would sing along with her brother to the delight of all their
children, and they would relate stories to the next generation of their
dad singing every night after work with their eldest sister at the
piano. Chandra would grow up to be a confident young woman like her mum,
with a beautiful voice trained by Saranagupta Amarasingha, which won
many awards in school.
Having completed her grade eight piano exams at age 13 she would
learn the Spanish guitar and play it to her little twins. Her cousin
Bertie Samarasinghe, Colombo’s master physiotherapist, remembers her
mother Rosalyn dancing while pregnant with her, and recalls Chandra
herself as a graceful dancer, holding her sari with the tips of her
fingers.
She was also a natural academic, and enjoyed every minute of her time
at Delhi University, where she completed her honours degree in Nursing,
along with her friends Trixie and Shireen. When they returned, Chandra
was determined that she would fight for the same opportunities for other
young women in the profession. She joined the Ministry of Health, and
having served as principal of nursing schools in different parts of the
country, she was offered a scholarship to Boston University,
Massachusetts, to read for a Masters in Education and Administration.
She was already married and had twin daughters by then. With a heavy
heart but with the old determination, she left on a plane this time,
setting off yet again to another institution of scholarly excellence to
reach for a new horizon over yet another rainbow.
The responsibility weighed heavily. Unlike the optimistic young woman
of the post-independence years, this time, in 1966, she had encountered
many hurdles placed in the way of the task for which Delhi University
had educated her. Across the water in Ceylon, nobody wanted graduate
nurses. It was important that she proved it was necessary and possible,
and Boston would bring her closer to achieving what seemed impossible.
She was not one to give up. She had made it her mission.
Boston would prove to be a wonderfully memorable experience with high
academic success and an offer of yet another scholarship to read for a
PhD. She was very pleased. This would make it that much more difficult
for anyone to stop her setting up a graduate course for nursing. She
would make all arrangements for her family to join her. This was a rare
honour in the mid- 60s and she would be one of few Ceylonese women to
have achieved it.
Domestic compulsion on Chandra de Silva was such that she had to
change her plans, decline the offer from Boston University and return to
do what she could with her Master’s degree. She was never to do a PhD
although there were two more offers from the WHO over the years.
The second and third time it was the Department of Health which
prevented her, refusing to grant her leave, even when the WHO agreed to
fund it at the Peradeniya University instead of overseas. All this only
made her even more determined that she would keep fighting for her
ultimate dream of making available to others in her profession the
privilege of a university and a postgraduate education, and to the
country, competent nursing staff academically qualified up to
international standards.
When she died five years ago, she had witnessed several batches of
fresh faced young graduate nurses receiving their degrees at the passing
out ceremony of the Open University at Nawala. She had finally seen her
Delhi dream come true almost half a century later, when she was invited
to set up the graduate programme at the Open University in coordination
with a Canadian university.
She left her job as the Programme Director of the Defence Ministry’s
Dangerous Drugs Control Division and went along for a much lower pay, to
start from scratch, or from behind scratch (as she put it in a charming
letter in 1992 to Prof Roberta Carey), the long cherished dream of a
University degree for nurses. She was deeply involved - from buying
tables and chairs for the office to writing the curriculum, setting exam
papers, and teaching, administering, motivating, recruiting staff. She
telephoned her old friends from Delhi University, now all retired, and
persuaded them to join her in this historic project.
On her last day at work, I picked her up from the very pleasant
offices of the Open University around 1 pm. When Dayan, my husband, and
I walked into her office, she was standing near the person who was
typing the last exam paper that she was to set, looking over his
shoulder to ensure it was being done correctly.
She turned around and smiled at us, exam paper in hand, visibly happy
to be doing what she was doing, and at being where she was, although she
was about to go into hospital to have an operation performed on her to
remove a kidney which had developed a tumour. She handed over the paper
to the typist, looked around the room and collected her bag, not
bothering to clear her desk because she was going to return to work as
soon as the doctors could be persuaded to let her.
She never returned to the Open University. She never returned home
from hospital. At her insistence, she was at the General hospital but
the surgeon was not of her choice, for she had opted for the respected
senior professor. Her extended family watched in horror as
insensitivity, irresponsibility and incompetence combined in the medical
misadventure of a nicked pancreas which poured viciously corrosive
juices into her abdomen causing three weeks of agony despite the heroic
effort of a second and nobler surgeon to save her in a hurried second
operation.
What was this utterly remarkable person who had given so much of her
life to the improvement of health services of her country thinking, as
she lay in bed falling in and out of a coma, unable to speak a word or
communicate in any way with anyone, her eyes slowly moving at times, a
lone tear dropping down her cheek, an occasional painful blink in
response to desperate pleas from her family ?
At 3 pm on January 28, 2006, her pain mercifully ended. Her legacy
however, would last for many years to benefit young women like the ones
all those years ago in a train, looking to a future bright with
possibilities. |