your family update
You Backed them and things began to change
“We earn just enough for food. Nothing is left for anything else.”
Niroja and her husband live in the East of Sri Lanka. They have been married for 12 years. They now have a one-month-old child. The three of them live without a home of their own and without a toilet.
Her husband does daily labour, taking whatever work that comes up; crop work some days and masonry on others. That income covers food, mainly groceries and rice, and nothing more. When something comes up that they cannot pay for, they go to a neighbour or to her sister-in-law for help. There are no savings to fall back on. When money runs out, it runs out.
Niroja manages the household spending and keeps it as tight as she can. Her husband sometimes has to travel far from home to find work, and she worries when he does.
Niroja went through a hard stretch that still stays with her. She got very sick and spent nine days in hospital and was then sent to Kandy, which is far from home. She says nothing came of it.
Around the same time, there was a happy event she never got to be part of. She describes walking close to that place and watching from a distance, because of her illness. This memory still stays with her.
The two of them have been trying to build toward something more. They looked at starting a small business together but had no means to do it. The income from his labour has never stretched far enough to make a start.
What Niroja wants most right now is a house. She is clear about that. She also wants her husband to be able to do toddy tapping as his own steady work, so he is not always depending on whatever labour happens to be available that day.
She wants to run a small shop of her own. Both of them are working toward a place where they are not just getting by on food alone, and where their young child grows up in a home they can call their own.
