Caroline de Bono

Brighter Path has funded the printing of an Emerge Lanka legal toolkit. Designed by lawyers at iProbono, working with Emerge, this toolkit is written in three language – Sinhala, Tamil and English. They set out basic rights and legal options for young women. The toolkit is intended to be user friendly for vulnerable girls who may not know the law and their rights. Designed for participants in the Emerge Lanka programme we are delighted to support this initiative and we will also be giving them to our own Brighter Path care leavers.

Brighter path is a small organisation and we operate on a modest scale. One of the advantages of this is that we are able to tailor our support to the very specific and individual needs of the young people we support. Nadeesha is a good example of a young person we helped through some very difficult times. She really benefited from the flexibility of the Brighter Path model.

When Nadeesha was still very young her father was imprisoned for killing another man in a fight. Her family was left destitute. She slept rough in a cemetery with her mother and her older brother Asanga. Her mother, who was an alcoholic, made what money she could by singing songs to entertain bus passengers. Before long Nadeesha, aged only 5, and her brother were placed in a children’s home by the probation services. She stayed in this home with her brother until she was 13 years old and then she was transferred to a girls only home a few hours away. She only saw her father once again after his release. He came to visit her when she was 15 years. She told me that he looked destitute. A few years later she heard that her father had died.

Nadeesha worked hard in her orphanage and passed her O-Levels and then A-Levels. When she was 19, she was ready to leave the children’s home but was told by staff that she could not. She had been identified as a useful worker who was good with younger girls. She was told that she was expected to stay and work as a matron in return for all that she had received over the years. For a young woman who had grown up in an institution this was an almost impossible situation. On the one hand she had a strong sense that this was wrong, that she could not be forced to stay. On the other she had no one to ask for help or advice. She was extremely vulnerable and did not really know whether what she was being told was right or wrong. What could she do? Her difficulties were compounded by a complete lack of support from visiting probation staff. It seems extraordinary but no professional was prepared to stand up for her or explain her rights to her. Probation officers told her that her only option if she did not stay was to agree to being released into the care of her older brother, Asanga. To this day no one has been able to give me a satisfactory explanation of how an adult woman could be forced by the state authorities to choose between staying in servitude or being signed over to a male relative, her brother, with whom she had almost no relationship.

In any event Asanga was not interested in helping his sister. He had by now left his children’s home and was doing odd jobs. He had not seen Nadeesha for years. So there she was, stuck in a horrendous legal limbo. Even though she was an adult she had no formal status, no papers and was unsure how to challenge either the Probation Service or the children’s home where she was now effectively imprisoned.

Desperate but at the point where she almost did not care what the personal consequences would be, Nadeesha eventually ran away from the children’s home in the middle of the night. She tracked down her brother and her one piece of good fortune was that Asanga knew someone at Brighter Path. He contacted us and from then on Brighter Path has supported Nadeesha.

Our priorities were sorting out Nadeesha’s legal status, finding her accommodation and supporting her with vocational training.

We instructed lawyers who brought court proceedings on her behalf to formalise her status and recognise her rights as an independent adult. Once this was done and a judge discharged her from the supervision of the state, we took Nadeesha to her children’s home where she was able to collect her personal belongings, school certificates and birth certificate. She had finally achieved the same legal status as any other adult of her age.

When Nadeesha joined our programme, we did not yet have a girls’ transition home. We looked carefully for somewhere for her to live independently and be safe. We were concerned for her welfare and her mental health was fragile. Our solution was to place her in accommodation which we rented from a supportive female lawyer who specialises in child protection. Nadeesha lived in a bedsit adjacent to the lawyer’s office. The lawyer worked there with several female paralegals which meant that as well as the Brighter Path staff there were lots of people checking in on Nadeesha every day and providing friendship and support. She also received some mental health support. This arrangement broke down when the pandemic struck and no one was able to come to the office any more. Nadeesha became very isolated and again her mental health suffered. After some time we realised that she would benefit from living in a family setting and she moved into the home of a carefully selected family as a paying guest whilst still being mentored daily by Brighter Path.

The third limb of our support for Nadeesha was supporting her through vocational training. She wanted to study to be a nursery teacher. This is a 2 year course which requires commitment and hard work. The course started well but again there were real problems during the early months of the pandemic when courses stopped and Nadeesha became very isolated. Her mental health deteriorated to the point where we were very concerned for her safety. There was a crisis period where she wasn’t looking after herself properly. She also stopped attending her course but we maintained our support and encouraged her to resume her training which she did. Brighter Path staff helped her through some very difficult times. As she progressed in her training Nadeesha started working with children in her nursery placement. She found that she really enjoyed this work and her health improved too.

Nadeesha completed her two year training course and qualified as a nursery teacher. She has been living independently for the last three years. She is now working in a well-regarded private nursery in Colombo and has good prospects. She is still in touch with Brighter Path and reaches out to us when she wants to. There are so many moments in Nadeesha’s journey when the odds against her just seemed impossible. Over the years we spent many hours on her individually, addressing her needs and supporting her. We are proud of all we have achieved together.

We have established a partnership with a boys’ Certified Home. This institution provides secure accommodation for between 20 and 30 boys who have been detained by the criminal courts. If the boys are able to acquire some technical skills before they leave the home at 18 their prospects on release will be much better. With this goal in mind we are funding a masonry and stonework teacher. He is teaching the boys essential skills including bricklaying and plastering. We have seen the high standards of workmanship that the boys are achieving. They are motivated and enjoy the stimulating classes.

As part of our ‘family strengthening’ programme we returned to the greater Polannaruwa area where we distributed food, dry rations and other essential supplies to vulnerable families. These are primarily single grandmothers caring for grandchildren who would otherwise be taken into state care. We are also supporting a number of single parents in great need, often managing chronic illnesses themselves (typically kidney disease) or caring for children with significant disabilities. By providing this ongoing support we are helping keep families together and reducing the risk of children ending up in orphanages. A key feature of our work is regularly visiting every single family in their own home. Most do not have access to transport or childcare and live in remote areas. Visiting enables our staff to asses and assist every family individually and to build long term relationships.

A young baby being cared for in a children’s home needed life-saving heart surgery. The Provincial Children’s Commissioner approached Brighter Path to explain that a leading surgeon at the Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children in Colombo was willing to perform the operation if funding was in place for a specialist nurse to care for the child afterwards. Since November 2024 Brighter Path has been providing the necessary funding for 24 hour care from a specialist nurse. We are delighted that this young baby is making excellent progress following her operation.

We are delighted to report on the support that we have been providing to Emerge Lanka. This is a non-profit which focusses on providing support for young girls who have suffered sexual violence. In Sri Lanka, most girls who suffer sexual abuse are placed into the care of the state. This is intended both as a witness protection measure and because the authorities often consider sexual abuse involving a minor to be a failure of both parents. Children who are survivors of abuse are therefore nearly always taken into institutional care rather than being supported in their own homes.

Like Brighter Path, Emerge Lanka tries to deal with the aftermath for these young women who have suffered the trauma not only of the original abuse but also the trauma of court hearings and being dislocated and removed from all that is familiar to them. Emerge runs residential programmes which help young people move on from the institutions in which they have been placed and into the community.

We have been providing Emerge with ‘reintegration packs’. These packs are intended to provide those items which are essential for starting out in independent life. They include toiletries, sanitary pads, basic first aid supplies, bed sheets and a towel, groceries, cooking utensils, a backpack or handbag for work, office shoes and much more. When girls leave Emerge’s home they are helped to find work. However, without support in the transitional period before they receive their first pay packet, they would otherwise have nothing to live on. These packs make a huge difference to the prospects of an individual girl successfully transitioning to independent living.

On the last Saturday in June we were very proud that one of our care leavers, Rangani, was ‘capped’ as a nurse.  This is an old nursing tradition where student nurses receive their nurses’ cap before starting on the final stage of their nursing studies. The ceremony took place in the large indoor stadium at Sugathadasa.  It was a moving ceremony with hundreds of student nurses all smartly dressed in their starched white uniforms. Families were invited and our girls’ co-ordinator Kalpani went to support Rangani with Nishantha, Brighter Path General Manager and one of the other girls from the transition home.  It was always Rangani’s dream to be a nurse and we have supported her throughout her training. She has done so well with her studies and is looking forward to completing her training soon and becoming a full time nurse.