your family update
You Backed them and things began to change
“My children aren’t in school right now. We had to pull them out because we didn’t have enough money.”
Pushparani Selvarasa lives in Kakkajivatdam, in Sri Lanka’s East, with her husband and their three children. The children are at school age, with one in ninth grade and one in fifth grade.
The family of five runs on whatever her husband can earn from labour work, loading and unloading stone materials in Kadampur and Kalvali. But, the work is not steady. It comes during a certain season and then it stops. When there is no season, there is no income.
On the days work is available, he earns 3,000 rupees. But those days do not come often enough to cover everything the family needs, and school costs have become one pressure too many.
Right now, the children are not going to school. Pushparani and her husband made that call themselves, pulling the children out to cut costs. It’s not what they want things to be for the kids, but it’s where things are. Keeping three children in school takes money the family doesn’t reliably have, and something had to give.
Day to day, the family manages with what comes in. Even though things are difficult Pushparani refuses to be weighed down by it. She doesn’t talk about their situation as being hard.
What she does talk about is what she wants for her children. She wants them to go to school and be educated. She wants them to have a home and something that belongs to them when they are grown.
She and her husband are working towards that every day. Even in a season when the work has dried up and the children are home instead of class, they hang onto hope.
