"When God gives you faith and you cherish it as the best thing you can give a child, it is wrong to say choose him when he grows up."

"The Lord has planned my vocation from the beginning. It is, as St. John Paul II said, a gift and a mystery. Now I look back and realize how everything was connected." This is how Hasitha Menaka Nanayakkara, a final year student of high school program in Theology at the University of Navarra and student of seminar Bidasoa International, describes how she feels her priestly vocation.

He was born in Sri Lanka 28 years ago, a country where the majority religion is Buddhism, professed by 70% of the population. Catholics make up only 6% of the population. With a Catholic mother and a Buddhist father, he and his older sister were baptized at birth and educated in Catholicism from an early age. The effort put in by his mother made it possible.

"Thanks to the fact that Sri Lanka is a country where the difference between cultures is not a conflict, I was able to continue to grow in my faith. First at a Catholic high school and then at a Buddhist high school . Life has given me many challenges. Every day I was looking for reasons to protect my faith, but that has made me grow," he says.

He says he realized when he was older what his mother had done for him and the effort she put into his formation in the Catholic faith. It was at a shrine where he was working. Many pilgrims came there. One day he met a mother and her two daughters. She told him that she was Catholic but that her daughters were not baptized, so that when they were older they could choose. "When God gives you faith and you appreciate it as the best thing you can give to a child, it is a mistake to say that he should choose when he is older," he says, keeping in mind his own experience.

Together with another colleague from his diocese, he arrived in Spain four years ago without speaking any Spanish. Both are the first Sri Lankan students to come to study at the University of Navarra on a scholarship from the CARF Foundation.

He lives at seminar Bidasoa International where he felt very well received from the first day: "Both at the University and at seminar they provide us with the necessary environment to be formed and to get through the difficulties. The purpose of a priest's life is not himself, but to love the Lord and his neighbor, and this can be seen in each of the one hundred companions from 25 different countries who live there".

He is sample fully grateful for the financial aid received from the benefactors, without which he could not be formed, and explains his vision of how he perceives it: "I see the seminar as the womb of the Virgin, where other Christs are born; and the benefactors as St. Joseph, from their support other Christs are born in the Church. That is why we often call them fathers and mothers.