Queen’s Honours List

Mark Gooding and Ms. Catherine Mole, two British Nationals living in Sri Lanka have been honoured by The Queen in her Birthday Honours List.
UK’s Deputy High Commissioner to Sri Lanka and the Maldives Gooding has been awarded an OBE for his services to Foreign Affairs.
Mark Gooding has served in Sri Lanka since 2008, contributing to the range of the High Commission’s work, including consular, economic, political and commercial affairs. Gooding’s next post will be as UK’s Ambassador to Cambodia.
Mole, the founder of the disability charity ECSAT (Equality-based Community Support And Training) in Galle, has been awarded an MBE for her contribution towards the inclusion of the disabled into society. Her relationship with Sri Lanka starting in 1995 when she spent a year in the country volunteering with the Prithipura Homes for the Disabled. Through her university years and later, during her stint with VSO in Vietnam, she continued to visit Sri Lanka and work with Prithipura, setting up a small enterprise for its residents and running an organisational development process. Mole returned to Sri Lanka in 2003 with the aim of settling in the country and working to improve disabled children’s lives. After the 2004 tsunami she established ECSAT, an organisation focused on rebuilding in tsunami’s aftermath, rebuilding with the inclusion of children and adults with disabilities in the community. ECSAT has worked with hundreds of children and young people with disabilities bringing them out of their homes to mix with their peers; helping them to access education; providing their family members with knowledge and support; giving them opportunities to learn life skills and vocational skills that other people take for granted.
ECSAT has also provided training in sign language not only to deaf children, but also to their families and community members so they can communicate with people around them.