I was born in Sri Lanka to an ordinary family with an extraordinary amount of love. My mother counted other people's money from behind a bank counter. My father sold potatoes and onions from a stall barely a metre wide. I have one older brother, and the best day of my week was Sunday — the one day my mother was home, the kitchen smelled like heaven, and I'd come tearing back from Buddhist Sunday school just to sit at her table.
Then came the day the people ran.
It was a Poya day in 2004 — a full-moon holiday, the calmest day on our calendar. I was watching monks give a sermon on television when, suddenly, everyone began to run. People do not run in temples. But the ocean was coming. I watched the tsunami take thousands of lives in a single afternoon — the crying, the cruelty, the piles of the dead. And then I saw something I have never forgotten: an entire island deciding to rebuild itself, together. The poorest people I knew gave the little they had to strangers they would never meet. That is when I learned what I still believe — when it truly matters, people come together. I have wanted to stand with people ever since.
But I was also a child of war. Growing up, I was taught to be afraid. There were parts of my own country — the north, the east — marked in red on the map, places I was told never to speak of. "We don't go there." I was even afraid of small planes, because in wartime a plane overhead meant bombs, and bombs meant funerals.
Then the war ended in 2009, and the lie quietly fell apart. The people of the north and east were brown-skinned like me. They got hungry like me. They were more frightened than I ever was. I began asking why we had hated each other — only to find that we never really had. We had been played by politicians and profiteers, because war is a business, and somebody always gets rich. Then I learned the truth closest to home: my own aunties and uncles had roots in the north. My grandfather — a neurologist who spent his life saving others — was from the north. The grandmother who paid for my education had married him. The "other" was my own family.
We were never enemies. We were the same. Hate was never the answer. Love was.
In October 2018, I landed in Melbourne, and I have lived far from my family ever since. I spent the pandemic alone, lying awake wondering whether my ageing parents were okay. If you've ever been an international student, you know the arithmetic we never talk about: we eat less so we can send money home, then tell our families we ate so much we can barely move. We skip breakfast to afford petrol. We skip the doctor, because a $100 bill is two weeks of groceries. We work the night shift in the pick-packing factory and smile on the morning call. We carry our families on our backs so they never feel the weight.
I came to Australia with Buddhism in my bones — raised in temples, mentored by monks, having spent days in forest monasteries turning over the nature of life. Here, love widened my library. Through my partner, a follower of Sanatana Dharma, I began studying the Bhagavad Gita. I read the Gospels. I sit with the Quran. Every tradition has handed me another lens on people, on the divine, and on the strange privilege of being alive.
Now I've stepped into community services, and I have a story to tell. I struggled for years to find my footing — never realising that every stumble was pressing a footprint into who I am becoming. Being an international student is almost impossibly hard, and I won't pretend otherwise. I'm here to walk it with you, so you make fewer of my mistakes and go further than I did.
If any of this resonates with you — hold my hand.