your family update

“When I was very young, my father broke his leg. My mother was dead. And I had to take care of my three sisters by myself.”

Rajini lives in a village called Soravamunai in Eastern Sri Lanka with her husband and their two children. Her eldest is a daughter, twenty-eight, and the youngest is a twelve-year-old son. Her husband works as a daily wage laborer, but some days he can’t find work. Right now, he has been in bed with a fever and has not gone to work for twelve days. Rajini somehow manages the house and sells vadai in the evenings to cover the family’s basic needs.

She tries not to borrow food on credit unless she knows for sure she can pay it at the end of the month.  But that leaves them with almost nothing. The children go to school and have tuition classes. Their youngest goes to three classes in a day, which costs two hundred rupees each day. Rajini makes sure they have food and money for school even if she has to go without herself.

Before she got married, Rajini worked hard looking after her father and sisters. Her father had an accident and broke his leg, and her mother had already died when she was young. She became the one taking care of the family and later went to Jordan for two years to work and support them. She came back and got all three of her younger sisters married before she married.

Even now, she keeps track of every rupee and makes sure the children’s school fees are paid and that they have enough to eat. She says her life is about the children. She wants them to grow up well and have a life without debt. And she works very hard every day to make this possible, selling vadai and managing the house so her children can finish school and have a chance to do better than she could.