Page 141 - Hemas_Piyawara_Book
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As the then Dean of the Faculty of Prof. de Silva adds: “I remember vividly, the day that Mr. Abbas Esufally and Ms. Shiromi
Medicine and now the Vice Chancellor Masakorala first visited us in Ragama. We realized that we had a shared dream of a
place that offered treatment for children with developmental disorders. So we worked
of the University of Kelaniya, I consider together on making our dream come true.
it an enormous privilege to have had “We set up the AYATI Board of Trustees in late 2016, with a legal framework for the
University of Kelaniya to work in partnership with the Hemas Group, and with MAS
the opportunity to support this project Holdings, which came on board soon after. Each of them pledged Rs. 100 million
from its inception. It is not only unique towards the cost of construction. A leading firm of architects, MICD Associates, very
generously agreed to provide design and consultancy services for the building, free of
in the services that the centre provides charge. We asked the Ministry of Defence for support in construction of the building
for a stigmatized, vulnerable and much and the Engineering Corps of the Sri Lanka Army did a wonderful job for us.
neglected segment of our society, with an “While construction was going on, the university made a formal request to the Ministry
of Health, through the Colombo North Teaching Hospital, to get the professional staff
unparalleled learning environment for that we need to run the centre and it responded without hesitation because the officials
hundreds of students, it is also a unique were able to see that together we could provide services that no other institution in Sri
Lanka could even dream of offering.
example of how much can be achieved “At the time that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa came to Ragama and formally opened
when state universities and the private our centre in early 2020, there were about 3,500 children registered in the MDT clinic
sector come together. that was run by the Department of Disability Studies. Many of these children have
continued to visit the AYATI Centre and in the 3 years since then, the numbers have
more than doubled, while the range of different services offered by the centre has
expanded greatly.
Prof. Nilanthi de Silva
“We now have a cumulative total of about 9,000 children who have been
registered with us over the years. Many of them are from our Western Province,
but there are many who come from all other parts of the country as well. We
are able to offer these children state-of-the-art diagnostic services as well as
individual and group therapy sessions, all free of charge.
“Our staff is very conscious of the fact that these children and their families are
particularly vulnerable, socially as well as financially. During the pandemic, when we
had to go into extended periods of lockdown and parents couldn’t bring their children
physically, our staff supported them through tele-health sessions.
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