about a month ago room to Read hosted their last event of the year- the literary fest! the fest featured several famous authors and personalities, food, and fun interactive workshops(all profits went towards the construction of Vidyaloka school’s library) and happened to be 8 hours long.
as always everyone in the service had an assigned role as we hosted this event- my tech person role from COMUN found its way to this service and I ended up making the Instagram posts for the festival (RTR INSTAGRAM).
We had invited Jonathan Geense an author of the book “Tiger and the Girl” who had a cute audience of three 3yo girls- Arali, Minara, and I forgot the last one’s name-
Dr. Henry Throop, a renowned NASA astronomer who has published over 40 scientific articles and contributed to the New Horizons mission, promoting astronomy to developing nations. he showed the kids (and us) the sun through his telescope and told us about some cool facts about what goes on in the sun that most of us never heard of.
The two Sri Lankan personalities that joined us were; Sanath Herath, a Sri Lankan landscape artist who used watercolor to showcase his unique style and spoke about the endemic butterflies of Ceylon, and Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, a science fiction author and co-founder of Watchdogs, as far as I can remember the Q&A session with him mostly consisted of Aniq(service leader) and him talking about gaming.
for a Q&A as well as Rohini Mohan, an Indian journalist and author who discussed her writings in her book based on the Sri Lankan civil war. We were also so lucky to have, Kai Bird, who co-wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” which was later adapted into the Oscar-nominated movie Oppenheimer. fun fact Kai Bird’s grandson’s dog has the same name as one of the service leaders.
my favorite part of this event was Charles Conconi speaking about the famous Pekeo trail in Sri Lanka which “takes trekking to new heights!”. their organization shared ways sustainable ways to enjoy the beauty of Sri Lanka- coincidentally my parents and a friend of theirs happened to be on the trip that was organized by them and happened to call him a few minutes before his session- there is a big possibility Mr. Lockwood convinced my parents to take me on their next pekoe trails trek.
