Welcome back, everyone!
We have officially wrapped up the 2025 academic year with our incredible Empower Work-Study Scholarship students, and what a journey it has been. As the countdown to graduation begins and we prepare to bid a bittersweet farewell to this batch, we wanted to dedicate this space to the people who walked beside them every step of the way. Over the next few posts, our educators will share their personal reflections on the year. To kick things off, we are delighted to feature our very own Vihan (affectionately known to the team as ‘Mr. Perfect’).”
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As the final days of 2025 slip away, I find myself sitting at the cafe of Avinya Academy watching the evening light settle over Bandaragama, still trying to process everything this year has held. Of course, not the only reason we stayed till sundown but the sentiment was there.
A huge Avinya hello to everyone new here and an even bigger welcome to those who have stuck around with us since day one. It has been one crazy ride after the next – and we’re glad to have you with us. As the year 2025 comes to an end, I thought it would be best to look back at the year we’ve had at the academy.
Teaching students who have been counted out by almost every system has never been easy, and this year tested us in ways we couldn’t have predicted. Personal crises, family pressures, self-doubt, and the everyday weight of starting from less than zero showed up at our doorstep almost daily. Yet somehow, amid career counseling sessions, family emergencies, and moments when I wondered if anyone was actually learning anything, something beautiful kept growing. These students—our students—kept choosing to show up, to try again, to believe that a different future was possible.
What a distance they have traveled in eleven short months. They arrived knowing only a few words of English and left conversing with us in a language they once saw as foreign; they started afraid of a computer and ended the year working on Excel sheets for their new employers. Customer Service classes turned shy nods into warm, professional greetings; Maths sessions that began with tears over basic percentages ended with proud budget spreadsheets. Our pilot English Immersion sessions went off with a blast —an intense, sometimes chaotic experiment where conversations about everything, from Education to History happened in English. Watching them speak about their weekend plans entirely in a language that felt impossible a year ago is a memory I will carry forever. And then came the internships: first nervous steps into salons, call centers, and offices that once seemed galaxies away.
This batch walked straight from those placements into permanent jobs—roles they never dared to imagine, in places that usually close their doors to young people without connections or polished certificates.
Today, when I see them using English to communicate with others, hear them proudly correcting each other without any sort of stigma, or get random voice notes that simply say “Sir, my supervisor says I’m getting promoted” – I know 2025 was worth every hard day. The challenges were real, sometimes crushing, but they became the very soil these young lives needed to push through and bloom.
To our donors who believed in second chances, every volunteer who came along, and every student who refused to give up—thank you. Because of you, Bandaragama will soon have accountants, guest-relations officers, data entrants, and future managers who started the year thinking “a job like that isn’t for people like me.” 2025 reminded us all that transformation is messy, exhausting, and absolutely possible. Here’s to the Class of 2025—may the year ahead be kinder, and may you keep proving the world wrong, one brave step at a time.
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Thank you, Vihan. That was so heartfelt, I had to dry my eyes before I could get back to work. 🙂
You might have noticed Vihan’s little teaser about why we really stayed until sundown. Curious to know the rest of the story? Keep following our series over the next few days to find out!
We have plenty more to share leading up to the big day on the 6th, so don’t go far! Isuru’s reflection post will be dropping very soon.
– Geeth