your family update
You Backed them and things began to change
“I’m 61, one woman carrying all the load. And feeding my husband with a spoon for 11 years.”
Shanthini is 61 years old and lives in Kakkachchivatam, in Sri Lanka’s East, with her husband and their 24-year-old daughter. For 11 years, her husband has not been able to work. He has a seizure condition and a spinal problem that has not improved since an operation over a decade ago. Shanthini has been caring for him and feeding him with a spoon the whole time.
She is the one keeping the household going. She takes on whatever work she can find: weeding, cutting, pounding rice, stringing chillies. None of it is steady. Each job is task-based and can take a day or more. Her husband gets a small disability allowance, but it barely covers a few meals.
Their daughter works at an estate and that income helps, but the family still runs out of money and takes on debt to cover daily expenses. When a payment comes in, Shanthini uses it to pay the debt down and then starts again.
The house they live in is not a proper house. There is no electricity and no facilities. Shanthini says there is nothing at all. She and her daughter are both working, and still it is not enough to change that.
Her daughter left for the estate because the situation at home was so hard. She had to. There was no proper house, father ill, no steady income. Shanthini holds that feeling close. She describes trying to hold everything together with what she has and what she knows. But she keeps going.
But she is also 61, and she knows what her body can and cannot do. She knows she cannot keep doing heavy outdoor labour much longer. What she wants is to work from home instead. They have land, and she wants to be able to grow what they need and eat from their own place rather than going out every day just to survive.
She wants three meals a day without debt attached to them. She also wants to see her daughter settled and hopes to buy her a small piece of land of her own someday. Shanthini is still working toward all of it, holding the household together the only way she knows how.
