your family update
You Backed them and things began to change
Seeing my child there, helpless. That is the hardest thing I carry.
Ishwary has looked after her son every day of his life. He’s 27 now. He has never been able to walk.
That’s the fact her whole life is arranged around. He can’t get to the toilet on his own, so she takes him. He can’t manage a day on his own, so she manages it for him. There has never been anyone else to do it.
When he was younger she took him to doctors wherever she could find some money, hoping one of them would find something that helped. No one did. So she carried on, and she’s carrying on still, at 58, in a rural village in the east of Sri Lanka.
Of everything Ishwary tells us about their life, it’s seeing him helpless that she comes back to.
And she says, “there’s never enough money.”
The household lives on the 10,000 rupees a month her son receives as a disability payment. It’s meant for one person and it covers everyone. Someone in the house takes daily labour and fells timber when he’s called for it, but that work comes and goes, and there’s no telling what a month will bring.
So Ishwary stretches what there is. She cooks once and they eat from it three times. That’s how the food lasts.
Their house has no toilet. For a family caring for a son who can’t walk, that makes every day harder than it needs to be. She has thought about building a proper house, one with what he needs in it, but there has never been the money for it. She hasn’t let go of the idea though. She holds on to it.
And she keeps them going. She has stretched a payment meant for one person across a whole household. She has chased help for her son from every doctor she could reach. And she gets him through each day herself, the way she has since he was born.
When Ishwary is asked about the future, she doesn’t have a lot to say. After 27 years, a different kind of day is hard to picture. What she comes back to is a future where they don’t have to live the way they do right now.
What would make the most difference is something steadier underneath it all. An income the family can count on, rather than one payment and whatever work comes.
That’s what your support over the next two years will help them work towards: greater income security, so that caring for her son and putting food on the table don’t depend on how a month turns out.
