your family update
You Backed them and things began to change
“My child should not suffer any of the hardships I have suffered. She should be well in the place where I left off.”
Dharmini is living in Kurinjamunai with her husband and their 17 year old daughter Vidhuja.
Dharmini never got to finish school. When she was young she got mixed up with politics and was unable to get herself out of that and was kept there for two years, and by the time she came back that chapter of her life was just gone. All the people she studied with are now in good jobs and she thinks about that, because she was a good student. She grew up without her father too, he left when she was three and her mum raised four kids on her own, grinding rice and flour to sell, doing whatever labour work she could find just to keep everyone fed.
Her husband does masonry and labour work when it is available, but this month he has only had three days of work. Three days for the whole month. Dharmini works at a food shop nearby, cooking from eight in the morning until three or four in the afternoon and bringing home somewhere between one thousand and two thousand rupees depending on the day. Together they are trying to cover household expenses that run to about twenty five to thirty thousand rupees a month, including buying water.
They tried to get ahead once by looking into work overseas, paid forty thousand rupees to someone who promised it was all arranged, and then that person took the money and disappeared. They mortgaged their house and sold their land to pay back the loan they had taken and walked away with nothing.
When things get tough they buy food on credit and sort it out when they can. Today is actually their daughter’s, Vidhuja’s birthday and Dharmini said they were able to buy a few chocolate pieces so she could share it with a few friends.
Dharmini says she doesn’t mind what her daughter becomes, she just wants her to have the chance to get there. What she is putting into that, every early morning, every long shift, every tough week, it is all so that Vidhuja doesn’t have to carry what she carried.