How Quintus Andradi Turned a Washing-Machine Appeal Into a Twenty-Bed Veterans’ Home in Sri Lanka

One phone call secured a washing machine for elderly servicemen. Quintus Andradi looked at the rest of the home and decided that was not enough.

By AngryPages Editorial

It began with dirty clothes hanging in front of an old house.

The Veterans’ Home at Bolagala, Katana, occupied an ancestral property dating back to the nineteenth century. When Quintus Andradi visited, he saw laundry lines across the front and two deteriorating dormitories behind it. The toilets were outside. The smell carried. Men who had served Ceylon before and after independence were living out their final years in conditions he compared to cattle sheds.

Andradi had not arrived with a master fundraising campaign. He had arrived because the home needed a washing machine.

In 2010, while visiting his daughter in Melbourne with his wife, Andradi reconnected with former Ceylon servicemen living in Australia. Lieutenant Chris Lawton invited him to the monthly meetings of the Ceylon Ex-Servicemen’s Association Australia Branch. Rank had softened with distance. Officers, sailors and their wives met in one another’s homes, brought food and addressed each other by first names.

After Andradi returned to Sri Lanka, Captain Ignatius Jayawardene mentioned that the Veterans’ Home Committee had tried and failed to buy a washing machine.

Andradi telephoned Lawton.

Lawton said he would speak to the association and asked for the price and bank details. Within a week, the money arrived. The Sri Lanka Ex-Servicemen’s Association bought the machine and asked Andradi to deliver it.

That could have been the end: one useful object, one successful appeal. Instead, the delivery exposed the scale of what was missing.

Andradi drew a plan for ten large rooms, each shared by two residents so that no elderly veteran would be alone during sickness or an emergency. On the drive to the home’s Christmas function, he showed it to Jayawardene and Rear Admiral S. Samaratunge.

Who would fund it? Samaratunge asked.

Andradi answered that he would raise the money.

The first attempts failed. Appeals submitted to newspapers were cut until, in his view, they no longer conveyed the need. Invited journalists concentrated on other aspects of the home. So Andradi went back to Australia—not physically, but through the network of people who had already trusted him once.

He wrote an appeal for the association newsletter. It asked readers to think of former comrades who had reached “the twilight years of their lives” without family members to become their hands and feet. Lawton warned that the members were pensioners and could not make large personal gifts. Andradi did not ask them to. He asked them to circulate the appeal.

One reader changed the scale of the project.

Lieutenant Commander Marty Somasundaram contacted Lawton and requested details. Lawton initially thought he might fund a room. Andradi sent the plan and an estimate of Rs. 9 million.

Somasundaram offered to fund the entire building.

He wanted to remain anonymous. His connection to the home was personal: during the anti-Tamil violence of 1983, after his house was burned and he was assaulted, another naval family had visited him in the rehabilitation centre where Tamil victims were being sheltered. The new accommodation would carry forward that remembered act of care.

The final donation reached Rs. 10 million. The twenty-bed Rex Nathanielsz Memorial Accommodation opened in January 2012.

The building did not end the work. Through Lawton and other former servicemen in Australia came beds, cupboards, mirrors, appliances, games and support for solar water heating. A friend at Baurs helped secure roughly one hundred pieces of furniture. A deep well addressed the dry season. When the old wood-fired kitchen needed replacement, Lawton contributed Rs. 1.5 million in memory of his late wife. Friends in Denmark provided exercise equipment and further assistance.

Andradi’s own accounting eventually reached Rs. 20,174,500 in money, equipment and estimated value. He was careful to describe some figures as estimates remembered in old age. The list runs from the Rs. 10 million building donation to pillows, curtains, tea, a generator, a water tank and the monthly allowance he declined as committee secretary.

The list matters because it shows how he worked. He did not wait for one institution to solve the entire problem. He called one friend for a washing machine, another for a kitchen, another for exercise equipment. He found people who could supply furniture, clear land, improve the water supply or pay tribute to someone they loved. Each appeal was specific enough for a person to answer.

The process was not harmonious. Andradi records arguments over contractors, money, transparency and who held authority. He paid labourers himself when the land had not been cleared before the foundation ceremony. He fought an additional payment requested at the end of construction. In 2019, he resigned from the association after a dispute over the management of the home.

The official record confirms what remains at Bolagala: a residential home for elderly tri-service veterans, expanded with accommodation and facilities including a kitchen, dining space, gymnasium and medical inspection room. Government and Commonwealth veterans’ organizations have continued visiting and supporting it.

But the institutional description misses the beginning.

Before the building, the deep well, the kitchen and the equipment, there was an old sailor listening to another old sailor say that the home needed a washing machine. He made one telephone call. The person on the other end answered.

The rest grew from that proof: ask clearly, account for what arrives, and never assume the first gift is the limit of what people will do for one another.

Read the source

Chapter 6 of Quintus Andradi’s Story of a Signalman in the Royal Ceylon Navy contains the complete account: the original appeal, the donors, the construction disputes, the itemized total and the people behind each gift. Read the complete digital edition.

Source note