> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Norway’s Transport Minister Pays Tribute to Her Father, a Jaffna Refugee Who Qualified as a Cook at 59 - URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/norways-transport-minister-pays-tribute-to-her-father-a-jaffna-refugee-who-qualified-as-a-cook-at-59/ - Published: 2026-11-08T13:37:51.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-08T13:38:47.000Z - Author: Our Reporter - Tags: November 2026 **JAFFNA, Sri Lanka-** Kamzy Gunaratnam, Norway’s Minister of Transport, marked Father’s Day on Sunday with a tribute to her father, a refugee from Sri Lanka’s civil war who worked for years in Norway’s fishing industry and in kitchens before going to evening school to earn a cook’s trade certificate at 59. In a Facebook post written in Norwegian, Ms. Gunaratnam, 38, who was born in Jaffna and arrived in Norway at the age of three, called her father her greatest role model. She wrote about the courage it had taken for him to raise his children in a country whose language and customs he was still learning himself. “I can only imagine what it was like to be a man with an immigrant background in Norway in the 1980s and 1990s,” she wrote. “To come to a country with a new language, new codes and completely different expectations, and still stand firm as a father, as a provider, as a role model.” Ms. Gunaratnam joined Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre’s Labour government in a cabinet reshuffle on 11 September, succeeding Jon-Ivar Nygård as Minister of Transport. Norway marks Father’s Day on the second Sunday of November. ## **From the fishing industry to City Hall** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/11/norway-s-transport-minister-pa-5e4114-1-1.jpg) Kamzy Gunaratnam’s father welcomes her, her mother and her brother at Fornebu airport in Oslo on the day they arrived from Sri Lanka in the early 1990s. Ms. Gunaratnam, now Norway’s Minister of Transport, shared the photograph in a Father’s Day post. (Photo: Courtesy of Kamzy Gunaratnam / Facebook) Her father “left a country at war to give us safety,” she wrote. “He came to the world’s best welfare state and worked hard to build a new life for us.” He travelled to Norway ahead of his wife and children and settled first in the north, where he worked in the fishing industry, “as many Norwegian Tamils did at the time.” When the family later moved to Oslo, he worked for many years as an unskilled cook. In 2009, he took a job at Huseby, the Oslo base of His Majesty the King’s Guard. Some years later, formal qualifications became a requirement for the work. “What did he do then? No problem,” she wrote. He enrolled in evening school and earned his trade certificate as an institutional cook four months before his 60th birthday. The certificate was presented at Oslo City Hall, she wrote, “with a deputy-mayor daughter in the front row.” Ms. Gunaratnam was Oslo’s deputy mayor from 2015 to 2021. “This is the story of Norway,” she wrote. She quoted a saying her father has always repeated: “When you are given the foundations, the opportunities and the help to succeed, yes, then you succeed.” He had shown his children what hard work meant in practice, she wrote. Ms. Gunaratnam also thanked him for choosing to raise the family in Groruddalen, the group of districts in north-eastern Oslo that has one of the highest shares of residents with immigrant backgrounds in Norway, including many families from Sri Lanka. She wrote that its diversity, its stories and its sense of community had made her feel “a richer person.” “All the choices and all the paths were made as we walked,” she wrote, adding that she could only imagine how he had guided his children while learning the language, the culture and the codes of the country himself. “He may speak slightly broken Norwegian, but with a big smile and a lot of warmth he makes himself understood and seen.” “If nothing else, I hope I can give a hundredth of what Dad gives to Norway, every single day,” she wrote. The post was accompanied by a photograph taken on the day Ms. Gunaratnam, her mother and her brother arrived at Fornebu, then Oslo’s main airport, and joined her father. “Look how happy he is to be reunited with us,” she wrote. She added that the picture made her think of people living with unrest, war, and fear. She ended the post with two lines from a Norwegian song calling for freedom for prisoners and a home for refugees, followed by a Father’s Day greeting in which she addressed her father as Appa, in Tamil script. ## **From Jaffna to the cabinet** Ms. Gunaratnam was born Khamshajiny Gunaratnam in Jaffna on 27 March 1988\. She has long gone by Kamzy, the name under which she now appears in parliamentary and government records. She was first elected to the Oslo City Council in 2007, at 19, and sat on the central board of the Workers’ Youth League, the Labour Party’s youth wing, from 2010 to 2012\. On 22 July 2011, at 23, she was at the league’s summer camp on the island of Utøya when a far-right gunman killed 69 people there. She survived by swimming away from the island. She later recalled her mother telling her that the family had not fled gunfire in Sri Lanka only for her daughter to be shot at in Norway. In October 2015, at 27, she became the youngest deputy mayor in Oslo’s history, a post she held until October 2021\. In January 2019, while deputy mayor, she visited Sri Lanka, called on President Maithripala Sirisena in Colombo and met women in Jaffna, Mullaitivu and Batticaloa. She was elected to the Storting, Norway’s Parliament, for Oslo in 2021 and re-elected in 2025\. She sat on the justice committee and later the health committee, and from 2025 was first deputy chair of the transport and communications committee until her appointment to the cabinet. She is a co-author, with Martine Aurdal, of the 2021 book “Din kamp er min kamp” (“Your Fight Is My Fight”). As Minister of Transport she is responsible for policy on the movement of people and goods and for postal services. Her ministry oversees Norway’s roads, railways, airports and coastal administration.