Barbara and Nalika (center) with their families during their trip to Sri Lanka.
From Italy and Sri Lanka to Erie to New York: lifelong friendship born at Hurst By Sue Corbran
Barbara Wenig and Nalika Nanayakkara have built remarkable careers in the high- powered world of New York fnance. They occupy top posts in prestigious frms, but they’re more than just colleagues – they’re good friends who frst bonded as international students at Mercyhurst in the early 1990s. In those days before the internet, when Barbara Pacicco of Rome, Italy, and Nalika Nanayakkara of Nugegoda, Sri Lanka, decided they wanted to attend college abroad, it meant a tedious search through college catalogues to fnd a school that would welcome foreign students. By coincidence, both reached out to Mercyhurst, which quickly accepted them and ofered scholarship help. Barbara arrived at Mercyhurst a year after Nalika. She says the two connected quickly, and their friendship remains strong to this day. “We hit it of and became close friends,” Nalika agrees. “We’re very diferent people personality-wise and in how we approach situations, but we complement each other.”
Their Manhattan ofces aren’t far apart, so they get together at least monthly for lunch or after-work drinks. Their families have grown close as well and meet up regularly; they’ve even traveled together. Two years ago, the families visited Sri Lanka where Nalika introduced them to her homeland and native culture. Now they’re thinking about a similar trip to Italy, so Barbara can return the favor. A quarter-century ago, there was a vibrant community of Irish students at Mercyhurst, but few other international students. Nalika and Barbara laugh now about some of the adjustments they faced. Nalika, who arrived in January, reports, “There must have been three feet of snow, which I’d never seen before.” She’d purchased a winter coat when she arrived in New York, but didn’t really have the proper attire to survive an Erie winter. Both women had studied English in their own countries, so “academic English” wasn’t much of a problem. Barbara admits, though, “Idiomatic English wasn’t my thing. There are lots of funny stories about the common expressions I didn’t understand.”
While both women say Mercyhurst prepared them well for their business careers, they are equally grateful for the liberal arts classes that are part of the Mercyhurst experience. In Sri Lanka, Nalika says, students take high school entrance exams and then are assigned to focus in just one feld, in her case math and science. “If I had stayed there, I would have been pigeonholed in chemical engineering or something like that,” she says. Exploring the broad array of subjects she studied at Mercyhurst was “part of the excitement and the journey.” Things weren’t much diferent in Italy, Barbara says. “The liberal arts concept didn’t really exist in Italy. Once you were assigned to a faculty, that’s all you did.” Both also praise the sense of community they felt at Mercyhurst. “The sense of community and the friendships allowed me to be in America by myself. I doubt you’d be able to make those connections in a lot of places,” Barbara says. “I didn’t make friends like that at Ohio State,” she refects. “There was just something very special about our experience at Mercyhurst.”
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