your family update
You Backed them and things began to change
“When it rains, the roof leaks so badly that we can’t stay in our house”
Gopika lives in Batticaloa with her husband and their 4 years old son. It’s just the three of them at home. Her husband does any kind of wage work, whatever someone offers him, he does. Some days he earns two or three thousand rupees, but work is not steady and somedays there’s no work at all. Last month, they had no income.
He has an iron plate in his leg from an old injury, so he can’t stand for long hours. This makes work even more difficult. He even went to Qatar for work for a year, but they were not happy with his work because of his injury, he struggled to get consistent work and had to come back.
Now the money they had borrowed for him to leave has turned to debt, on top of everything else they are paying off slowly. These days, money is so hard to come by that even food is hard to get. With the rains, there is no work.
Gopika stays home to look after their child. She wants him to grow up healthy and go to school, but paying for school, food, and their other needs is not easy. Her mother helps when she can, and sometimes Gopika buys things on credit at her mother’s friend’s shop, to settle when they can.
Their house is not fully built either, and leaks heavily when it rains. For now, they are staying in a part of her mother’s house. They hope to build their own home one day, one they can live in comfortably, where her son will be safe from the rain. Even though there is no way to get out of the debt and their hardship quickly, both Gopika and her husband are working little by little, every day, to pay off their debt, and have a house of their own.