Author(s): Goonetilleke, Maithri

Biography

Second Edition with two new stories Vula Bevalile: Letters from a Young Doctor is a collection of vignettes written over seven years by Australian doctor Maithri Goonetilleke, who has been contributing his time voluntarily in Swaziland-a country devastated by extreme poverty and the HIV and AIDS epidemic. Through the stories, the reader is taken on an incredible journey across a landscape of extreme adversity and medical and economic hardship. But it is the final, overwhelming sense of humanity that is most striking and empowering. The ultimate outcome for the reader is a profound understanding of a people with enormous resilience, pride, humility, and courage. This book calls on us to think again, to ask ourselves what we are doing in our own lives and why. - Paul A. Komesaroff (Professor of Medicine and Director, Centre for Ethics in Medicine and Society, Monash University, and Executive Director of Global Reconciliation, Australia) These beautiful letters express a burning desire on the part of a physician to reach out and live from a place of divine love. - Wayne Dyer (internationally renowned author and speaker in the field of self-development) In beautifully limpid and pared-back prose, Maithri Goonetilleke distils his experiences in Swaziland...Words such as "uplifting" and "profound" cannot begin to capture the quiet potency of the stories he tells about the people he works with and treats. - The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald