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When Jeeva decided to return to Sri Lanka, she knew she was trading the predictability of international life for something messier, more complicated, and ultimately, more hers.
She came back as a Sri Lankan citizen — not with a dual passport safety net, but with nearly four decades of experience as a development economist and a genuine desire to put that expertise to work in her own country. Having left when she was just two years old, she’d spent her career building what she calls “nationality neutral” professionalism across continents — designing sustainable programmes that addressed poverty and shaped policy across South Asia, East Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. But 2015 felt like the right moment. There was a new government, a whisper of hope in the air.
The Reality Check
Reality, of course, had other plans. The euphoria didn’t last. Easter bombings, economic crisis, Aragalaya. “I was quite shocked at the situation,” Jeeva admits. But where others might have packed up and left, she stayed — and kept working. Drawing on her background in development policy, she channelled her frustration productively, including taking a seat on the board of LIRNEasia, one of the region’s leading tech and policy think tanks. Navigating institutional gaps, it turns out, was exactly the kind of problem her career had prepared her for.
Still, she stayed. And in staying, she learned.
Learning the Local Playbook
“Sri Lankans will never say ‘I don’t know,’” she laughs — one of the first things she had to decode. Whether it’s an educational culture where questioning isn’t always encouraged, or simply the way thoughts shift between Tamil or Sinhala and English, directness takes different forms here. Early on, she learned to ask follow-up questions, probe gently, and read between the lines. “Once you understand how communication works, you can actually get a lot done.”
Time management was the other adjustment. Meetings start late; vendors operate on their own clock. Her fix? Building buffer into everything and reframing the wait. “Patience has become a real virtue,” she says — not with resignation, but with the ease of someone who has genuinely adapted and learned to use the slower pace to think more carefully.
Home, and Then Some
The social side took longer to crack. Without having gone to school here, she lacked the alumni networks that quietly power so much of Sri Lanka’s professional life. So she built her own — through the work itself. Sitting on boards, advising on policy, connecting her global experience to local needs. Her Canadian spouse faces his own integration challenges, but together they’ve found their rhythm. And the work has given her something that took years to earn abroad: genuine standing in a place that is actually hers.
None of it might have clicked, though, without that first meal. Roast paan, pol sambal, crab curry. The kind you dream about when you’re halfway across the world. “Ah, I’m home,” she thought. It’s funny how food can do that — cut through jet lag and uncertainty and remind you exactly why you came back. But what keeps her here now is more than nostalgia. It’s the knowledge that the work she is doing in Sri Lanka — on policy, on poverty, on the questions that actually matter to people’s lives — is some of the most meaningful of her career.
Despite everything, Jeeva hasn’t wavered on what home means. “With all the quirks, it is my country, and I can criticise and not feel bad.” After decades of working everywhere else, that sense of belonging matters enormously. But so does the impact. Being able to volunteer, to sit at the table where decisions are made, to help “one of my own” — that is the part that makes the rest of it worthwhile. She didn’t come back to observe Sri Lanka from a distance. She came back to be part of it.