Sri Lanka’s women-managed hotel break down barrier | world News

Kandalama: Time for daily employees meeting in Sri Lanka Hotel Amba Yalu Where the female manager Jivanti officer joked: “It won’t look very serious, there are only girls around the table.”
The hotel on the banks of the Kandalma lake in the green hills of Central Sri Lanka opened with a unique sales point in January – its employees are particularly women.
This is the country’s first, designed to promote women in a tourism sector, where men keep 90 percent of hotel jobs.
“The Speaker wanted to start a new hotel with a new concept,” the official said.
He explained how the idea sprouts from Twin Blow, which inscribed the tourism industry of the island -first Kovid -19, then the financial crisis of 2022 and later political unrest that topped the President.
“It’s really a bad time,” 42 -year -old said that only men got work when there were employment vacancies. “We wanted to give opportunity and attract more women.”
Chandra Wickramasinghe, the chairman of the Theam Collection Group, who runs 14 hotels, said that he wants to show what women can do if women give a chance.
“Unfortunately, in hotels, in Sri Lanka, there is no gender equality,” he said.
The defect rests on a mixture of factors – lack of training, a culture where women are seen as the first and most important mothers, and very little wages that lead to the notion that women can also stay at home.
“In our male society, when it comes to women working in hotels, it is a good girl at the reception and to clean the housekeepers,” he said.
“I wanted to go a little further.”
‘Skills and courage’
For 33 rooms of Amba Yalu – which means “best friend” in the Sinhala language of the island – a team of 75 women handles every task, traditionally seen as men.
They are enthusiastic, such as maintenance activist Hansika Rajapaksa.
“People think it is difficult for women to be involved in maintenance.”
“But after coming here and undergoing training, we can also carry out the work that is expected from us without any difficulty”.
Meanwhile, Dilhani, who only gave his first name, feels confident in his role as a security officer in the army after 15 years.
“I have experienced war … I have handled the obstacles,” he said. “With that experience, it is very easy to do your work here.”
Others want to set an example.
23 -year -old chef UPCA Eknayake said, “It is a good opportunity for women to showcase their talent, to demonstrate our skills and courage for new generations”.
It was difficult to break the old habits initially, the manager officer said.
“Our experienced employees were used to work around male colleagues,” he said. “Automatically, they were waiting for someone else to do things, as they were trained like this.”
But the owner said that he removed the suspicion of colleagues.
“Some people didn’t believe this,” the owner Wickramasinghe said, who dismissed misunderstandings, who ridiculed that an all-woman team would just “start gossiping”.
The hotel has been welcomed as a “excellent initiative” by Nalin Jaisunder, president of the Association of Tour operators.
“We want to encourage even more women to join the tourism industry,” he said, adding it “very good imprint on our customers”.
Customers have taken notice.
A Canadian Tourist wrote in a review on a booking website, “I felt that I could answer further questions from my partner and without looking at them for confirmation.”
‘A woman’s power’
Women’s rights activist Nimalka Fernando said that the initiative was “actually the path-breaching for Sri Lankan society”.
While he said that Sri Lanka was the first nation to choose a woman as Prime Minister – Sirimavo Bandranaik – tradition, culture and labor markets continue to block the rights of women in 1960.
She explains that women dominate areas that provide the country the main source of income: textiles, tea and foreign remittances.
“Women are considered as an exploiting object,” she said. “Now the important thing is to give dignity to women labor.”
Amba Yalu is only the first step, accepts his manager, but it is making a change.
“We have single mothers and mothers with two or three children,” the official said. “Here, they do not have to suppress what they want to do in their lives.”
Wickramasinghe sees it as a way to highlight the learned text as a boy.
“I am inspired by my mother … she became a single parents with eight children,” she said.
“She was working in a hospital at the same time and she succeeded very well. So I realized the power of a woman … that she could do miracles.”