your family update
You Backed them and things began to change
“I started working at fifteen years old, I’m 35 now and I’ve never been able to stop.”
Jeyalini is 35 and lives in a village in Sri Lanka’s East with her husband and their little daughter who is three. Her husband goes for daily wage work, whatever he can find that day. Some days he gets work, some days he doesn’t, so the income is not steady.
She also tries to help when she can. If there is paddy work, weeding or farm work, she does it. Before, she had worked making mud bricks and had even helped in a chicken farm. She has been working from a very young age, and even now she is still helping to pay the loan her mother took to build houses for her older sisters.
There are days when things are tight. Sometimes they don’t cook in the afternoon if there is no money to buy food. On those days, she sends the little one to her younger sister’s house so that she can eat.
They don’t have electricity or water at home because they don’t have the money to get those connections. What they earn is just for food, to pay off debt and for the little one’s daily needs.
Even with all these difficulties, she is thinking about how to move forward. She is always looking out for work and trying to handle both the family’s needs and debt, so that they can live a better life. She says she wants to start a small business or find a good job so they can manage better for her daughter.
She says that her child talks about becoming a teacher someday. She wants to support her dreams and is happy to let her study and choose her own path. So Jeyalini is determined to keep working so that her daughter can live out the future she wants to.