COLOMBO: When Inthugathevi Kanesh won gold at an international kickboxing tournament in Pakistan last month, she became a beacon of hope across Sri Lanka and especially in her home Mullaitivu, an impoverished and forgotten region of the Northern Province.
The 23-year-old athlete’s victory at her first international tournament has come to symbolize what talented youth from disadvantaged communities are capable of when given a chance.
Kanesh’s father, a vegetable seller, died in a train accident before she was born. Needing to provide for the family, her mother went to the Middle East to work as a housemaid, leaving Kanesh and her brother for 12 years in the care of their grandparents in Puthiyanagar, a remote, impoverished village in Mullaitivu.
Until a little over a decade ago, the region was the theater of an intermittent insurgency that started in the early 1980s with the Tamil Tigers fighting to create an independent state in the northeastern part of the island nation.
Three decades of civil war have brought to the country’s north socioeconomic issues unique and more pronounced than in the rest of the country.
Kanesh’s village, home to some 80 families, is still barely connected to electricity, has no running water and has only one bus connecting it to other villages. It was chance that directed the young woman to a sports career.
“In 2019, my A-level year in school, the sports ministry came here and held a coaching camp and selected me,” Kanesh told Arab News.
She had only started training to box two years earlier, despite cultural constraints.
“I faced lots of gender-related problems,” she said. “Girls going alone is an issue in our culture and in this community. In the beginning, mother was also against me
Read more on arabnews.com
arabnews.com
