Sri Lankan teacher-turned counsellor Gethsie Shanmugam, who counselled war widows and orphans to overcome their nightmares, are among the six winners of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Awards, regarded as Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize, agency reports said.
Shanmugam was cited for “her compassion and courage in working under extreme conditions to rebuild war-scarred lives, her tireless efforts over four decades in building Sri Lanka’s capacity for psychosocial support, and her deep, inspiring humanity in caring for women and children, war’s most vulnerable victims.”
She did psychosocial work for adults and children displaced by war in Sri Lanka’s former war-torn Northern and Eastern Provinces, and became more intensely involved when she worked with the Save the Children Norway.
The other recipients are a Japanese historian who helped Cambodians preserve the Angkor temples, an Indonesian working for the return of large tracts of forest land to indigenous communities, a Singaporean who leads the cooking of 6,000 meals a day for the destitute, a Philippine theater group which stood up to a dictatorship, and a Filipino who oversaw the opening of job-generating export processing zones.
The Magsaysay awards, named after a Philippine president who died in a 1957 plane crash, are to be presented for this year in Manila on August 31.