From There To Here
Jetha Devapura · 45 min
A boy who arrived in Australia at 12 with a Sri Lankan accent and a quick wit grew up to build the country's largest cancer transit home and bring Lifeline to a nation in crisis — driven by courage, compassion, and a personal battle with OCD.
At 12, Jetha Devapura arrived in Australia from Sri Lanka with a broad accent and quick wit. Two Australian kids mocked him in grade 7; he shot back with a riposte that surprised even himself. That instinct for justice would shape everything that followed.
Jetha's early years in Melbourne were marked by struggle. Placed in the lower academic stream at high school, he found his place with kids who weren't focused on study, until he failed two consecutive years. When a school officer asked what he wanted to do with his life, he said he wanted to be a doctor. Told that doctors are A students, he was moved to advanced maths. He studied hard, topped the class, and discovered something that would anchor his life: put a person in the right environment and they can thrive.
Decades later, as a corporate expat in Malaysia, Jetha burned out from rushing and loneliness. He returned to Australia, saw a psychiatrist, and was diagnosed with OCD. His father's words came back to him: hemming hemming, slowly, slowly. Through that mental health crisis, Jetha developed three character strengths: courage to stop the checking, compassion to be kind to himself, and commitment to keep going. When he visited a cancer hospital in Colombo and saw families sleeping on floors between outpatient treatments, he couldn't walk away. He raised funds and built a 194-bed transit home, the largest in Sri Lanka. He brought Lifeline to Sri Lanka nearly 15 years ago, and it became the largest crisis support centre there. Now he's dedicating the next 20 years to school-based work in Australia through the Let's Talk program, teaching young people and teachers how to have the conversations that keep people connected before they reach crisis point.
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