Ãå±±½ûµØ

 

 

 

Melissa Fleming 00:00

I'm always so inspired when I hear about the transformative powers of education. My guest this week grew up in a working-class family in war-torn Sri Lanka, but a scholarship to a good school set her on a path to a career with the United Nations at a very young age.

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 00:19

I really think that my parents did an incredible job. I was never told that because I was a girl I couldn't do X, Y, or Z. They always encouraged us to explore our passions, our enthusiasms, as long as we put education first, because that was non-negotiable for all three of us. We had to study hard. We had to work hard. We had to be educated because they believed that was the only way we could have lives that were better than theirs.

 

Melissa Fleming 00:57

Jayathma Wickramanayake is now working to empower other young women. She says it's all about making a difference in our world. From the United Nations, I'm Melissa Fleming. This is Awake at Night. Welcome, Jayathma.

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 01:21

Thank you, Melissa. Thanks for having me.

 

Melissa Fleming 01:23

These days, you are Senior Policy Advisor at Ãå±±½ûµØWomen. But when I first got to know you, you were appointed Youth Envoy. This was in 2007. I was still at UNHCR. I remember meeting you then. I believe you were the youngest senior official at the UN. And I just wonder, how old were you when you were appointed to this job?

 

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 01:50

Yes, it was in 2017. I was 26 years old when I got appointed as the Secretary-General's Envoy on Youth.

 

Melissa Fleming 01:59

How did you feel when you were appointed?

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 02:02

Honestly, I couldn't believe it. I did not think that it was possible for somebody like me from a very small country, from a working-class family, to ever hold a high-level position at the UN. So obviously I was nominated by a number of youth organizations when the Secretary-General called for nominations. I went through interviews. I gave my best in the process. But I did not believe that I would be the one chosen by the Secretary-General for this role. So when I received a call around 3 a.m. one day that I was selected for this role, I was thrilled. I was very happy. But at the same time, I was nervous, and I felt like I have this huge responsibility now on my shoulders of representing the interests and the rights and the needs of more than 1.8 billion young people around the world.

 

Melissa Fleming 03:00

So the person offering you the job didn't look at what the time was in Sri Lanka.

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 03:06

I don't think there was conversion of time.

 

Melissa Fleming 03:09

So you had your phone on. And what was the first thing you did when you got that call?

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 03:14

I had, and I was at the time training to be a civil servant in Sri Lanka. So I was actually in a sort of a military camp completing my cadet training for the trainee civil service offices in a hill country area in Sri Lanka called Diyatalawa, in a hostel. And I received the call, and I obviously immediately called my parents and my husband. And then I informed my instructors that I was offered this role in New York at the Ãå±±½ûµØheadquarters. And they immediately arranged for me to go back home to the capital. So I think I took the 8 a.m. bus from Diyatalawa to Colombo to then go home, go to Colombo, meet the Resident Coordinator at the UN, learn more about the Ãå±±½ûµØand this role and, you know, deal with all the administrative aspects of then accepting the role and moving to New York.

But I think, when I spoke to you about getting this call at 3 a.m. in the morning, a memory also comes of the interview that I did for the role of the Envoy, because the interview was at 12 midnight my time in Sri Lanka, because there were a lot of high-level people in the panel. I think it was not easy to find a time that is, you know, ten hours ahead of you from here in New York. So the interview was scheduled for 12 midnight. I had gone to work in the morning. I came home, I got ready, I set up my laptop. I sit down around 11 p.m. at night preparing for the interview, and there's a thunderstorm that took place immediately outside, and we lost electricity. So there was no way for me to connect to Skype. The interviews were carried out on Skype at the time. We didn't have Microsoft Teams. And I immediately wrote to the office of the Secretary-General informing them that I might not be able to do the interview, because we just lost electricity because of the thunderstorm.

But my husband, he just made sure that I had the opportunity to at least face the interview and give myself a fair chance. So he started calling people to see who had electricity in a driving radius of our home. And we found that my mother-in-law's office had electricity at the time, and she had a spare key to her office. So at around 11 midnight, we drove about 20km from our home to my mother-in-law's office, and she opened the door for me and let me set up the computer on her desk. And I was doing the interview while a severe thunderstorm was taking place behind us, and both of them were waiting outside for me to finish the interview so that, you know, we can go home after the interview had finished.

 

Melissa Fleming 06:00

Or maybe all of that excitement around the thunderstorm quelled your nerves and you just had to go for it in the interview.

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 06:08

Yes. You know, that was an unforgettable experience.

 

Melissa Fleming 06:11

Well, it sounds like you have a very supportive husband.

 

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 06:14

I do, yes. I met him when we were in high school. So we've been together 16, 17 years now and he's really my biggest cheerleader, my biggest support system. So I'm very lucky to have him.

 

Melissa Fleming 06:25

I was going to ask some of the challenges that you faced in your job, but I mean, just to your husband also. Is that unusual in Sri Lankan society to have a male championing a young woman in her career the way he did?

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 06:46

It is. It is very difficult. And people often ask me, 'How difficult was it for you as a young woman to make this huge transition?' But I often tell them, 'I don't think it's easy for young women of color, but at the same time, I think it's even more difficult for young men to do this type of transition because of the patriarchy and the unfair expectations that the society has on them.' So when my husband decided to give up his job in Sri Lanka and move with me to New York, he was met with a lot of resistance. So he was an officer in the military. He was a navy officer, and he was the first in his batch. So there was this assumption that, you know, in 25, 30 years, he will become the general of the commander of the navy in Sri Lanka. And he kind of had his entire career path kind of created for him.

And when he decided to leave that and move with me to New York and decided to be unemployed for a while and then learn another profession and move to... change his career path, basically all in support of my work and my career. And not only he met with a lot of resistance from his, sometimes from within his own family and our friends, but he was also humiliated. I remember his friends from the military was asking him, 'Oh, are you moving to New York to wash your wife's clothes? Are you going to be her chauffeur?' But Dayan is the kind of person he's very... He doesn't take that kind of things very seriously. And he would always respond with a joke. And he's very grounded. He's very realistic. He doesn't even sometimes talk about those issues [inaudible]. It doesn't matter. And for me, that support system has been incredible over the last six years, especially to deliver on the important responsibilities that I had as the Envoy on Youth.

 

Melissa Fleming 08:36

I mean, how did that make you feel when he was faced with such criticism and humiliation?

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 08:42

No, I felt terrible. I thought, you know, ¡®He's going through that because of me.¡¯ And there were even times I said, 'Maybe we can work out an arrangement where you stay in Sri Lanka, and I live in New York. We see each other every couple of months.' I was trying to sort of find ways, or either, I think come up with ways that I thought could work out better for both of us. But as I said, he's a very realistic man. And he said, 'No, that's not going to work. I think at this point your career is more important than mine. Therefore I'm deciding to support you. But maybe in 5 or 6 years my career will be more important. And then you will do the same for me.' So we are of that understanding that in each time of our careers, if we need to prioritize the other person, then we will definitely do it without any hesitation.

 

Melissa Fleming 09:27

Seems like a wonderful partnership. I want to maybe come back to it later because, yeah, a lot happened in those years in that very challenging position that you took on. And you know, so you moved to New York with your husband, and you became the Ãå±±½ûµØEnvoy on Youth. What does that job entail?

 

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 09:50

I came into the role at a time where youth was becoming a buzzword, so everyone was saying, 'You need to engage young people, we need youth.' But nobody knew how to do it, how to do it in the most effective, efficient, and meaningful way. So we developed a Ãå±±½ûµØsystem-wide strategy for the first time, bringing more than 50 Ãå±±½ûµØagencies together on very practical ways how we can engage with young people. The first part of the strategy looked at internally what are the reforms we need to do to empower young people working for the organization? And the second part looked at more in programmatic ways. What are the ways that we can help and support young people's education, employment, health, so on and so forth?

 

Melissa Fleming 10:33

How did you get to this place? I think your own activism began when you were very young, when you were growing up in Sri Lanka, which was in the grip of conflict. Maybe let's start with what was your experience during the war, because that is something that many young people around the world, too many young people around the world are grappling with right now.

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 10:57

No, unfortunately. So I was born in 1990 in Sri Lanka, and the war ended in 2009. So the first 19 years of my life, I lived in Sri Lanka when it was under conflict. But now when I talk about it, I have this very strange feeling because I am from the south of the country, and the conflict predominantly was in the north and the east parts of the country. We did have, you know, explosion of bombs in the capital, closer to where my school was. My father nearly escaped the bombing of the trains in 2008. You know, in school sometimes there would be these suspicious packages outside of the school gate. So we would be convened in a safe area of the fear of bombs. We went through some of these experiences in the south, but they are no way similar, or they are no way comparable to, I think, the experiences that children and young people in the north and the east who were living in the heart of the conflict went through.

So now when I reflect and look back at my experience living in Sri Lanka those first 19 years of my life, I wonder how also, in some ways, life was so normal for us, despite there is a full-scale war happening in the north and the east. Bombs blasting in, you know, religious places and in public places with this threat always. For an example, my parents, when they go to work, they would never take the same bus or the same train of the fear that there would be a bomb and both of them will die, and we will lose both of our parents at the same time. So they will decide to take different busses or different routes to work. At the very height of the conflict in the late 2000s, this was. All of that happened, but still it felt very normal. You know, we were going to school, we were doing sports, we were doing music in school. And in some ways, I still cannot make sense of that. But it¡­ You know, watching it on news, seeing it on news, used to deeply trouble me as a child. So when I was 13 years old, I wrote a poem to a national newspaper, speaking about how peace is the solution. I don't really know if I knew what I was talking about, but I knew that the killing and the death and the blood the violence needs to stop.

 

 

Melissa Fleming 13:34

I wonder what your poem said.

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 13:36

I remember it saying something about a tree that is planted on a grave of a person who is dead from the... Who died from the conflict, and the tree, having white flowers that symbolizes peace. So that was sort of the meaning of...

 

Melissa Fleming 13:55

How old were you?

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 13:56

I was 13, I was 13 then. But as I said, it really shaped my life in different ways. Because also, I think the war really segregated the people of Sri Lanka as well. So for an example, I've been to two schools during my childhood, and both the schools were Buddhist girls¡¯ schools that was kind of Sinhala speaking. And there was not a lot of exposure for us in the south to, you know, meet with the Tamil speaking people, Hindu people, or Muslim community.

So in a way, even the schools were segregated, and we were exposed to sort of this one ideology or one message that would then shape our worldview and the way that we looked at other people or the minorities in my country. And by that, how we would look at the war and the repercussions of the war and the causes of the war. And it's much later, when I was in my early 20s and when I went to university, that I started interacting more closely with my peers from other religions and other ethnicities and who spoke other languages, that would then give me a very different perspective of what I had been indoctrinated, if I may use the word, as a child.

 

Melissa Fleming 15:21

So at the university, it was much...

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 15:23

It was much more open. Yes, much more mixed.

 

 

Melissa Fleming 15:28

And I just wonder what that¡­ Even though you weren't directly impacted by the war but recognized later that you were actually a child of a war-torn country. How has that affected you in terms of your aspirations? And also how you were, you know¡­ What did you bring to the job from that experience? You know, given that you had the responsibility also to represent so many children around the world who have been forcibly displaced from war. I think the first time I met you we were in Somalia meeting many internally displaced people from that horrible conflict.

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 16:08

Yes. I think definitely growing up in a country affected by war but also affected by so many different, I would say, models of extremes. I don't know if that's the right way to say, but so many different ways of division. It makes you really critically analyze and think about everything that is in front of you. So the more I grew up and the more I was exposed to people from different cultures, different religions, different ethnicities, the more I started questioning everything I had learned through, you know, history books or everything that I had learned on the news at the time. Or any piece of information that is ahead of me, that is in front of me, I would think, 'But is this really true? But what is the other side of this story?'

And for me the ability to analyze information like that, but also being able to listen to two or more sides of a story and bringing all of that together for a conversation in a very constructive way was very helpful in my role as the Envoy on Youth where I would have oftentimes to create platforms where ministers and young people would dialogue. And I take great pride of having been able to create or convene conversations between these different parties. So I definitely think that is a skill that I learned by living in a, you know, deeply diverse and in divided society and growing up in one. But I also think the empathy that you develop by going through an experience yourself and then listening to people interacting with people. For me, it was very important not only to touch the surface of the problems or the issues that young people discussing me with, but more to find the root causes and the issues and try to address them there. Because from my experience as a child living in war, I knew if you don't address the root causes, you will never end the violence.

 

Melissa Fleming 18:19

So it sounds like that this role is almost like an interpreter. Because when the Ãå±±½ûµØgoes out into the world and generally meets with world leaders and, you know, the people with the power, and you go out and meet with the young people who feel or probably don't have much of a voice in many of these gatherings, and you bring back their voice and try to interpret it.

 

---

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 18:48

I found it very interesting when I ask from young people, 'What do they need?' I used to get this one answer that was very common across, which was education. Every young person was craving for an opportunity to be educated, whether it is the Rohingya refugees that I met in Cox's Bazar who were asking to... At the time, they were not allowed to go to school. This was back in 2018, 2019, I think. I think now they have some access to education, but at the time they were saying, 'Can we please go to school? Can we please learn?' Whether it's, you know, young people that I met in Greece who were also refugees and, in the camps, or you know, girls who were married at a very young age and who became mothers and never got the opportunity to finish their schooling.

Across the board, the ask was education, whether it is to start education or go back to education. So during my time as the Envoy on Youth, I focused also a lot on education and raising advocacy on education, but also mobilizing resources to support financing education, especially in conflict-affected areas and in developing countries. I related also very much to my childhood, being born in a working-class family. All my parents told us - we are three girls in my family, me and my sisters - was, 'You need to study. Education is your only way out of poverty.'

 

Melissa Fleming 20:19

So I'd just be curious to hear what kind of parents you had. Because, I mean, you were three daughters. And it wasn't necessarily, you know, that every parent was encouraging daughters to have education.

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 20:36

Yes. It was challenging for my parents. Both of them were working class. But also in a society that is deeply patriarchal, you are supposed to have sons, at least one son in your family. The pressure was even high because my father's family do not have any other sons. So if he didn't have any sons, our name, basically Wickramanayake, my surname, would end with my father and with us as girls. Because in my culture, you don't pass your family name as a woman to your kids. Which I later changed, by the way, because my son has both mine and my husband's family names. So they had three girls. And I remember my mom saying that my paternal grandmother actually did not even come to see my younger sister when she was born, because she was a girl. Because she was hoping, you know, my father would have at least one boy. So it was very challenging for them.

And also, society does not make it easy to raise girls. And, you know, particularly where we grew up, there was a lot of violence, violence against women, harassment in public spaces. So for them, it was in one way protecting us, but also not protecting us too much so that we wouldn't grow our wings and fly away one day. But I really think that my parents did an incredible job. I was never told that because I was a girl, I couldn't do X, Y, or Z. They always encouraged us to explore our passions, our enthusiasms, as long as we put education first, because that was non-negotiable for all three of us. We had to study hard. We had to work hard. We had to be educated. Because they believed that was the only way we could have lives that were better than theirs and that we could not suffer and that we could live comfortably.

They would bring us books as gifts. When we, you know, perform well in an exam or for our birthdays. I don't recall us having a lot of toys, but I recall us having a lot of books everywhere in the house. And I guess that was our window to the world, because they would bring us these translations of Nordic books, Russian books, Latin American books that were translated to Sinhalese. But even though both of them didn't speak a word of English and they still don't, they would go to the bookshop and ask people, you know, 'Can you recommend some good English books for my kids.' And they would bring those books home and encourage us to also read English.

 

Melissa Fleming 23:18

Do you remember one of those English books that you particularly liked?

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 23:22

There was definitely one book about a girl that was living in mountains in Sweden. I think her name was Heidi. I think that's...Yes, that's a famous book.

 

Melissa Fleming 23:33

I think it was Switzerland.

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 23:35

It was Switzerland, yes. And then there was another. It was a series of books by Enid Blyton. There was this book series, and then there was another series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. It was about a family that grew up in rural America, I think. And it was, you know, learning about their day-to-day life. They're living in this caravan. And there are two sisters, Mary and Laura. I remember reading really....

 

Melissa Fleming 24:03

Little House on the Prairie.

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 24:04

Exactly.

 

Melissa Fleming 24:06

We were reading the same books.

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 24:07

Is that America? Was it? It was, right?

 

Melissa Fleming 24:10

Yeah. You and I were reading the same books even though a generation apart, but...

 

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 24:15

Exactly. So I have a lot of fun memories also sometimes acting out those scenes with my sisters and playing around the stories. But also later in life when I reflect now actually back, I think of how feminist my parents were, even though they didn't probably know they were feminists at the time. In Sri Lanka, our disparity is very high. So, you know, if you're based in the capital, you have access to resources and services that you don't have if you are more rural. And for my parents, it was their dream to make sure that we had access to the best education, the best resources.

So they encouraged us to take this exam. When you are in fifth grade, you can take this exam, which is called a scholarship exam. And if you perform well in that exam, you get a scholarship to go to the country's best schools, which are usually attended by the elite. And when I was ten years old, I took that exam, and I scored very well. And I got into the number one girls¡¯ school in my country. I think that was really the turning point in my life because that again gave me access to so much more resources and opportunities that I did not have growing up in my village. But now when I think about it, because I have my own son and thinking, 'Would I make my son do a very competitive national exam when he's ten years old?' But also the fact that at ten years you have to leave your home and your village and go to boarding school in the capital where nobody knows you, where you also don't belong to the, you know, that social system, that social class. It can also be very isolating.

 

Melissa Fleming 26:03

What was it like for you when you arrived there?

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 26:05

I actually had a very positive experience because I feel like personality wise, I am also the kind of person who turns everything into opportunity. So it was very easy for me to make friends if I got into, you know, drama club. I got into the debate club. I did 20 out of the 22 sports we had in the sports meet, a certain year. I kind of got myself immersed into activities so that when school finishes, I'm not, you know, sad to go back to the boarding school. So I would stay in the school until like five, six in the evening doing other things and then go to my hostel like very late in the night so I only have to sleep there. And then every Friday, my father would be waiting at the gate of the school to take me home.

So in the weekends I would go home, spend time with my family, and on Monday they would bring me back to the school and my mom would always give me 50 rupees, like a small amount of money to, you know, get some snacks if I want. I would save that money until Friday. And Friday during lunch time I would go to the cafeteria and buy three pieces of chocolate cake that I would then put in my small lunch basket and bring for my sisters back home. So I had actually forgotten that memory until we started speaking right now.

And it was, I think, very tough for me as a kid. But I somehow made efforts to cope with it. But also, there were other girls in my class who couldn't cope and who ended up really being miserable. They were crying every day in school, after school. Some of them actually left the school to go back to their villages because I think at ten years old you are very small, and that kind of a huge change can have a massive impact on your life and on mental health. But I was lucky to survive that and turn that as an opportunity. But now when I think back and when I, you know, look at my son, I'm like, 'Is it even fair to put a ten-year-old kid through that experience?'

 

Melissa Fleming 28:08

These days, you've switched from working for and among the young people of our world, and now you're working for another constituency - half the world, or half the sky is some people call it. Now you're working for Ãå±±½ûµØWomen. How important for you is this job personally?

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 28:29

I think in both professional and personal ways it's a very meaningful and important job for me because lot of the issues that we're talking about, whether it's economic empowerment of women, whether it's education for women, whether it's political participation of women, whether it is women living in conflict affected countries, I feel like my life in some ways are relatable to all of the issues and all of the struggles that other women in the world are going through right now.

At the same time, the fact that I'm here, the fact that you are here, means we are standing on the shoulders of women who came before us and who paved this way for us to be here today. So I take this new challenge with a sense of responsibility, but also with a sense of privilege in the way that I need to now create more pathways for more young women like me to take up leadership positions, to shape international relations, to be able to really not only be a voice, but really be a powerholder in the conversations that we are having at the global level.

 

---

 

Melissa Fleming 29:37

So when you think about women and girls and young people, what is keeping you awake at night?

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 29:49

I'm usually a very optimistic person, but lately I have been feeling scared. I fear for our future. I fear that my future daughters or my future granddaughters might grow up in a world that they have less rights than I do now because of the regressions and the attacks that we see on the rights of women and girls. Whether it's about, you know, right to sexual and reproductive health, whether it's about the chronic underfunding of girls¡¯ education that we see, whether it is about the fact that if we continue at the current pace, it's going to take us 300 years to achieve gender equality. All of these numbers, these statistics and the situation of women and girls around the world in conflict zones that we see, it keeps me awake at night. The thought that women who come after us might have access to less rights than we do right now. So that's also why I think our jobs right now are so important to make sure that that doesn't happen.

 

Melissa Fleming 31:12

You mentioned you have a little son. I have the privilege of seeing him as a baby, and he's now a few more months older now. And he has both your last name and your husband's. Maybe you can pronounce his whole name for us.

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 31:26

Yes, his name is [inaudible] Wickramanayake Dias. So he's 16 months old now. And you know, in many ways, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, we break barriers for generations that come after us. And this was a very conscious decision that me and my husband made, that he will have both of our surnames, both of our family names. Because it shouldn't be that, you know, he has two parents, but he only has one parent's name with him. So, we wanted to make sure that he carries both of our names, but also the names of both his grandfathers forward.

 

Melissa Fleming 32:09

Wonderful. I did the same thing with my son. Daniel Fleming Thompson.

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 32:13

Amazing.

 

Melissa Fleming 32:14

But that was not as unusual in my culture as yours, so that's lovely. I wonder how it's working now. How did your husband then rediscover himself and his life in New York?

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 32:30

Yes. So he left his career in the military. He came to New York with me, took a small break. Also, sometimes he would travel with me to different places. But I was working. He was doing his own thing. And then he decided that: 'I've had enough fun, that now I need to focus on my education and my career.' So he went back to university. He studied a masters in computer science, and he's now working as a software engineer here in the United States. So he ultimately also found a new passion and a new career that he's really enjoying very much.

 

Melissa Fleming 33:10

Well, that's wonderful to hear. And how is it being a mother?

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 33:18

You know you hear about these experiences that change you and that transforms you. And I think I experienced that when I became a mother, the transformation of yourself and your whole worldview. That was so evident to me when my son was born. Like he brings me joy that I cannot explain in words. But at the same time as I mentioned I also worry about his future, and I fear about his future sometimes. And I convince myself that's why I need to work harder to make sure that his future is better than mine.

 

Melissa Fleming 34:12

What kind of world would you like for him, and for all of the young people that you've met over your career?

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 34:20

When I meet young people, especially the ones who have been through the toughest times in their lives. You know, we always come back, and we say, 'Oh my God, they were so resilient.' And I just sometimes wish that they didn't have to be resilient. I wish that they could just be children. I wish that they could just be soft and naive and playful. I wish that all the children and young people, you know, protesting on the streets, asking for climate justice, being arrested, being detained. I wish that they could just be children, go to school, play with their friends, come home, be with their families. I wish that they didn't have to assume the responsibility of the lack of action of adults have created. So when I think of a world that I want for my son, I would just wish for a world where he can be a child and a world that he can enjoy, and a world where he can be light and free and not be bombarded with responsibilities of issues that he didn't have a hand in creating.

 

---

 

Melissa Fleming 35:26

I assume you would also advise him to become an activist and involved in global affairs. What kind of advice would you give to other young people who are looking to pursue a career in international affairs?

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 35:38

Yes, I've already started my agenda by introducing feminist books to him even at like 15, 16 months of age. But I really would be very interested to see how he grows up to be and who he grows up to be and what he chooses to do with his life.

My message to all the young people who would ask me the same question because I would speak at universities, colleges, conferences. They're like, 'What advice do you have for us?' And I often used to joke and flip it around and say, 'Don't ask for advice.' I would say, you know, 'You as a young person would know what is best for you and you would know what is best for the community around you. So if you wait for advice, if you wait for invitations, the time might have passed for you to be able to take quick action to solve those issues in your community.' So I would always say, 'Don't wait for advice. Don't wait for invitations. Just look around you. Find ways to contribute to change in your own family, in your own community, in your college, in your university, and in your country.' I think no single action is small enough. I think every small thing we do today becomes a movement one day in the future and extraordinary things are done by ordinary people, right? So I encourage everyone to do whatever small thing they can do today to make that change in their life and their communities.

 

Melissa Fleming 37:09

Thank you Jayathma. Thank you for joining me on Awake at Night and also for everything that you have contributed to this world, your community, your country and to the UN.

 

Jayathma Wickramanayake 37:19

Thank you very much for having me, Melissa.

 

Melissa Fleming 37:23

Thank you for listening to Awake at Night. We'll be back soon with more incredible and inspiring stories from people working against huge challenges to make this world a better and safer place.

To find out more about the series and the extraordinary people featured, do visit un.org/awake-at-night. Do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please take the time to review us. It helps more people find the show.

Thanks to my editor Bethany Bell, to Adam Paylor, Josie Le Blond, and my colleagues at the UN: Katerina Kitidi, Roberta Politi, Geneva Damayanti, Tulin Battikhi, Bissera Kostova, Anzhelika Devis, Carlos Macias and the team at the Ãå±±½ûµØstudio. The original music for this podcast was written and performed by Nadine Shah and produced by Ben Hillier. Additional music was by Pascal Wyse.