your family update
You Backed them and things began to change
“When there’s no money, and I see my family hungry, we buy food on credit just so we can eat.”
Rithurshana’s younger sister walks eight kilometres each way to school along a jungle path. Rithurshana knows the route is unsafe, but there is no nearby school offering the grade her sister is studying.
Rithurshana lives with her husband, their baby, her elderly father and her younger sister. Her father can no longer work, and the household depends on her husband’s daily wage work. When there is no work, they buy food on credit and repay the shop when money comes in.
Her mother died about a year and a half ago after being struck by a man named John. At the time, Rithurshana was studying Grade Seven. She had received her results and was preparing to sit her second-year examinations, but she left school to look after the house and work.
“I was studying grade seven at the time. That is, the results had come and I was also about to sit for the second year. Then I stopped studying. To look after the house, to work,” she recalls.
Since then, Rithurshana has taken on responsibility for managing the household while her husband earns what he can. Her younger sister is still studying at Panchaeni, but the cost of her education is difficult to manage alongside food and other household expenses.
“Right now, financially, the cost of education is a big expense. Managing that cost is a bit difficult,” she explains.
The family lives in an incomplete house that was given to them by an organisation before they were displaced to Vanchi. It was never fully finished, and they have been using small savings to repair it gradually. Even with these efforts, Rithurshana says they are living without proper facilities.
“She doesn’t have a proper house to stay in,” she says. “She’s staying here with no facilities at all.”
When money runs out, the family relies on credit from the local shop. Food may be limited to rice until her husband finds work again, and the debt is repaid when there is money. At the same time, Rithurshana tries to keep her sister in school despite the distance, the unsafe road and the education costs.
She wants her younger sister to continue studying and become a lawyer. Rithurshana also hopes that support with education expenses will make it easier for her sister to reach that future. For now, she continues managing the house, stretching the family’s money, repairing what she can and making sure her sister keeps going to school.
Over the next two years, your support can help Rithurshana work towards meeting education costs, improving the unfinished house and building greater income security and stability for the household.
