From hamburgers to diplomacy
Today is International Women’s Day, the UN- based IPS has interviewed Kshenuka Senewiratne, Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations.
The art i cle gives an interesting insight into her life. It said:
This is not her first time with the U. N. Between 1988 and 1990, she served as First Secretary in the Permanent Mission to the U. N. in New Yo rk . But f o r M s. Senewiratne, her journey started more than three decades ago as she was walking down the streets in London, where her parents had just moved from Sri Lanka to provide her and her brother with high quality education.
Having just completed her high school board exams from Sri Lanka, she wasn’t sure what was ahead of her.
“I was walking down High Street, and saw ‘Help Wanted,’” she recalls of a sign she saw at a McDonald’s. So she figured she would give it a try.
Soon after she joined the cafe, she heard back from the University of Salford that she had been accepted into their programme for the next academic year.
She decided to continue working for McDonald’s in order to earn some money until her school began.
“And that was a time when they thought I had some amount of potential and they wanted to send me on training for floor management,” she recalls.
When she declined the offer citing her university admission, they were even more moved by her honesty.
They still decided to send her to the training and told her they’d have an open space for her whenever she wanted to return.
She did return once after she joined university. Even though the McDonald’s experience came far before her expansive career in foreign diplomacy — spanning from London to Brussels to Geneva – she still holds her lessons from the McDonald’s store in her work today.
Because of the nature of the work pressure on workers at a f ast- food joint such as McDonald’s, Ms. Senewiratne says it taught her the importance of being punctual and to think quick on her feet — which she says are key requirements in diplomacy.
“You have to l ear n everything around the store — from cleaning the toilets to the lobby area, the dining area, [ or] how you would put the milkshake machine together — all those technical things,” she says of her time there. “If something happens you must know which button to pull.”
She recalls a particularly funny memory with the milkshake machine where she pulled the wrong button, and was drenched in chocolate syrup. Today, decades later, she laughs as she re- tells the story. But back then, it was a major cog in the wheel of what would become her career.
“That’s where you learnt the essence of time that is inculcated into you,” she says, “whether be it flipping the hamburger, whether it is putting french fries, getting it and bagging it, [ or] serving customers — it is all on timing.”