The second annual blood donation campaign to commemorate the founding day of KDU’s Southern Campus, which falls on the 20th of May, concluded in style on Thursday, 20th April 2023. All in all, a record 164 students, academics, administrative staff, soldiers and other Southern Campus employees, donated their life-giving blood to fill the ever depleting coffers of the National Blood Transfusion Service. The campaign was conducted with the able support of the Hambantota District General Hospital’s Blood Bank. This year’s event was organised in the wake of 2022’s equally successful August blood donation campaign, which yielded a total of 151 blood packs. The “liquid love” collected from the Southern Campus has now transformed it into a life-giving sanctuary!  

As is well understood now, a university education is not merely for the purpose of making a living: it is for the enrichment of human existence. In keeping with this dictum institutes of higher learning should not only produce graduates well-endowed with scientific intelligence, conversant with the logic of their craft, but also inculcate in them the importance of charity and humaneness in order to ensure that the moral fibre of its student population is strengthened as well. This in fact is the sacred obligation of its professoriat: to ensure that they transition from inspired youth to conscientious adulthood as torchbearers of this nation.

At over 600 strong, our student population is a tremendous resource as “the young who can give back life with their blood”, especially since it has been said that “someone needs blood every two seconds”. What better way, then, than to organise an annual blood donation campaign to fill the depleting stocks of the country’s blood banks. “We need to motivate [students] to donate blood at least once in life to save the lives of people in need. Science has now proved that giving blood is a healthy activity and the amount of blood we give is regenerated in our body in a short period of time”.

The Southern Campus’ annual blood donation campaign is now an enduring reality! Our efforts have finally fructified to enable our collective dream of an annual blood donation campaign to be realised!