your family update
You Backed them and things began to change
“We can’t even afford water to drink or wash ourselves with.”
Kamalampikai has to buy water for her family when the village supply dries up. Five hundred litres, which just lasts one week now costs 1,015 rupees, and even firewood has become difficult to afford. She says there is sometimes nothing to bathe with and nothing to drink.
She and her husband are raising the daughter who remains at home. Their other four children are married and have left,. Their son is returning from Qatar after a long time, trying to find stable work.
Her husband catches fish for food and money. Some days he earns 1,000 or 2,000 rupees and some days he earns nothing. Kamalampikai works wherever she could. She hulls paddy, makes and sells some items of food, takes on handicraft work and runs a small shop using goods taken on credit. She had been making hoppers to pay the interest on the loans taken to send her son abroad. When he was there without work for eight months, she borrowed money locally and sent it to him so he could eat.
The family spent about eleven lakhs sending him to Qatar and still has debt to repay. For many Sri Lankans, this becomes the sad reality. Kamalampikai has worked hard and paid off most of the debt they owed but 75,000 rupees still remains. She also sold a cow they owed to pay 37,000 rupees for her daughter’s school supplies.
Kamalampikai does whatever she needs to do to make sure her children are living a better life than she did. But her own health has made work harder. She has high blood pressure and has sometimes missed clinic visits because she can’t afford them. She is now taking four types of tablets and has paused making appam, although she hopes to start again when her health improves.
The family also lives under an electricity tower, where she says sparks roll like a ball of fire during storms. This makes her mother’s cracked and crumbling house even more unsafe than it already is. Yet she continues to run the shop and support her daughter’s education. She wants her daughter to study, become a teacher and reach a stable point in life.
Kamalampikai keeps working through fishing income that cannot be relied on, water that must be bought and debt that has followed the family for years.
Your support over the next two years can help Kamalampikai work towards more reliable income for her family and a better future for her children..
