First-ever Library in Sri Lanka
May 6, 2025 — A chance encounter on a flight from New York to San Francisco in 2017 found Cathy Leiber, President, Judith’s Reading Room of Pennsylvania and Professor Tissa Wijeratne, Senior Neurologist and Chair, Migraine Foundation of Australia seated next to each other. Within minutes they discovered that they shared a passion for literacy, coming at it from wildly different perspectives. The five-hour flight was filled with discussions of brain health, literacy, education and the role that reading plays in lifting people out of poverty. Their conversation resulted eight years later in a shared commitment to establish a library in Dr. Tissa’s home country, Sri Lanka. This epitomizes how a Judith’s Reading Room library materializes “out of thin air.”
