After tracking down her birth family in Sri Lanka, Poppy Royal aims to help women fight poverty. Jaine Blackman reports

Working on a tea plantation in Sri Lanka for low wages and little chance of advancement is a world away from recent graduate Poppy Royal’s life in Oxfordshire.

But it’s one she may well haved lived.

“I was adopted at five weeks old by my lovely family in the UK where I have been brought up educated, safe and very much privileged for 21 years,” says Poppy, of Long Hanborough.

But it could have been very different and now, inspired by her biological sister’s struggles to be educated, she wants to help other young women from the country of her birth to have a chance to better their career prospects.

Poppy, who has graduated with a 2:1 in Social Anthropology from Manchester University was adopted by Jenny and Cliff Royal.

“They had already adopted my brother [Josh] two years beforehand and thought that it would be nice for him to grow up with a sibling from the same country and background,” she says.

After Manor Preparatory School in Abingdon, Poppy moved to boarding school in year seven at Downe House in Newbury.

“My choice to go to boarding school was really due to my brother’s absence from home as he attended the Royal Ballet School in London,” she says.

“He is a talented dancer and his ballet has been a huge part of our lives.”

Her parents had taken Josh and Poppy back to Sri Lanka a few times to show them where they had come from and visited the tea factory that they were told her mother worked at.

“Obviously, we did not seek her out then as I was so young and didn’t even want to. Apparently I sat in the car and refused to get out,” she says.

It wasn’t until later that Poppy began to be curious about her birth family.

“I believe that the course that I took at university is that which drove me to track down my biological family. A module that I took focussing on Kinship also covered adoption, where I studied reunions between adoptees and their birth families,” she says.

“I remember vividly sitting in one of these lectures and deciding that I wanted to do this too. I had never thought much about it before. I was perfectly content, and still am, with the life that I have and the family that I have in England.

“However I think a part of me thought that I may regret it if I didn’t just take the leap.”

With the encouragement of close friends she took the plunge and booked her flight to Sri Lanka.

“I then realised I had absolutely no idea where my family were living, if they were still alive, if they had moved country... the list went on.

“The civil war in Sri Lanka had only ended four years previously and at the back of my mind I had worried that my biological family had been affected due to their Tamil ethnicity.”

But although it was a few days into the trip before she got news, the quest had a happy ending.

“The tracking down of my biological family was incredible. I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome,” she says.

Poppy and her friends had met a Sri Lankan man named Suranga, who spoke English, at the hotel they were staying at and he offered to travel with them to translate when she met her biological mother.

“I hadn’t even thought about the huge language barrier between us,” she says.

After a five-hour journey to a tea plantation and an early night in preparation to meet her mother the following day, Poppy was woken by Suranga who said he wanted to chat with her before they set off.

“I slowly got ready and walked out into the foyer of the guesthouse we were staying in. Out of nowhere this small Sri Lankan lady dressed in a sari came running towards me.

“Before I could take it all in she had her arms around me and it took my a few moments to realise that Suranga had got up early that morning and this was my biological mother sobbing on my shoulder,” recalls Poppy.

Poppy soon found out that she had two older sisters.

“The younger of the two was 23 and was working in a tea factory in the capital, Colombo. My eldest sister, Manivila was 28 and had three children.

“When our mother was pregnant with me our father died as a result of alcoholism. This then left my biological mother in a difficult financial situation and was the reason she had to give me up for adoption.

“Since meeting my biological family I maintained contact over the phone. The language barrier has posed a difficult challenge but our relationship is still new and exciting.”

Poppy has been particularly inspired by her 24-year-old sister Pushpalalitah.

“Rather than follow the same life as our mother, she has chosen to change by focussing on her education to become a teacher. However, for this to be achieved she needs to learn to use a computer. She must also learn English. For this to happen she must go to both computer school and language school and cannot afford this.”

When Poppy returned to Sri Lanka in August 2014 she took a spare laptop that had been lying around her home in England.

“When I gave her this laptop I felt so much excitement and pure satisfaction as I knew that this forgotten object in my house was the future for her and the opportunity for her to fulfil her dreams of learning.

“She is a bright girl and I watched with pride as she showed me what she had learned from the few classes she had been able to pay for.”

Poppy aims to raise as much money and collect as many laptops as possible by July.

“Then I will fly out to Sri Lanka and begin to find the right women for the laptops,” she says.

“I will be looking for women specifically from the Tea Estates in Nuwara Eliya. The small town Ramboda, located 20 km away, is where my biological family are from and I have seen for myself the poverty and the need for some inspiration and encouragement.

“This campaign is personal and so I fully believe that my commitment to this cause will help make a huge difference to the lives of even just a few women. No matter how much money is raised, even one laptop will change somebody’s life and that change will be forever appreciated and remembered.”

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