your family update
You Backed them and things began to change
“If my husband doesn’t get work, we have no food to eat. There’s nothing.”
Santhini lives in Batticaloa in Sri Lanka’s East with her husband, their three-year-old child, and a grandfather who is no longer working. Santhini stays home to look after their child, so she can’t take on any work of her own right now either.
The family lives on whatever her husband earns doing daily wage field work. When there is work, there is food. When there is no work, there is nothing. The income comes to around 2,000 rupees a day when he gets work and it doesn’t stretch far with four people depending on it.
The family lives in a tin shed. There’s no toilet. When Santhini needs to use one, she walks to a neighbour’s house. But that’s not always possible, and when it’s not, there’s no other option.
The thing that sits heaviest on Shanthini is the living situation. No proper house, no proper food, and no proper security for the bay. She feels the weight of that every day. She is not someone who has given up on changing it, though.
She knows what it took for her mother to keep a family going through hard times, and she carries that with her. Her father died when she was five, and her mother raised 12 children on her own, working in the fields to put food on the table. That was the life Santhini came from.
What Shanthini wants now is simple and clear. Enough food for the family, a secure home for her child and a life without the kind of daily pressure that comes from not knowing if there will be work tomorrow. She wants her child to have a better life, and she wants to build that, step by step, from where they are now.
