One Water Story

I started off not knowing what I wanted to be when I grew up. This did not change when I needed to choose what to study after school. I decided to study Telecommunications Engineering because I liked maths and ended up working at Toyota after I finished. I was not happy but I still did not know what I wanted to change to. I was lucky enough to be asked to coordinate a project on environmental auditing of the company. Here I excelled and picked up all the wrongdoings much to the chagrin of the company management. From here I decided I wanted to transfer to the environment and sustainability sector but was still not ready to go back to studying and could not easily transfer my qualifications to a job in this new field. I decided to travel for a year all over South America where I completed an internship as an Assistant Water Engineer in Puerto Lopez, Ecuador. Here I discovered my passion for water, while helping local people get access to potable water. I saw the unbreakable links between socio-economic influences and water management. This experience, growing up on one of the drier continents in the world, Australia and my frequent visits to my birthplace, Sri Lanka and other developing countries my passion to aid in the investigation and improvement of water resource management was born.