your family update
You Backed them and things began to change
“We don’t have a toilet at home, so the children go to a nearby house when they one”
Suhanya lives with her husband and their three children. The children are 14, 12, and 7 years old. Most of her day is spent taking care of the house and looking after the children.
Her husband is the one who earns money for the family. He is a daily wage worker. He takes whatever work he can find. Sometimes he carries soil. Sometimes it is construction work.
Whatever work he gets, he does. There is not much work in their area, especially during the rainy season. Because of that he has been going to Colombo to look for jobs. He waits with other workers hoping someone will hire them for the day.
Even when he finds work it is not always easy. When he does mason work his legs start to blister badly. The skin fills with water and breaks, and then he has wounds all over. When that happens he can’t work for a days until it heals. So the income is not steady.
The daily costs are hard to manage and to feed five mouths. Food alone is about a thousand rupees a day. Then there are school costs for the children like transport and classes. Suhanya said the expenses are more than the money they bring home.
Still, it’s important to Suhanya that the children stay in school. Her daughter is doing well in her studies. The two boys find school harder, but they still attend classes.
The house they live in came from a housing scheme. The house is still unfinished. It doesn’t even hold a toilet. When the children need to use one, they go to a nearby house where relatives live, even in the middle of the night.
Suhanya’s childhood was also very difficult. Her father died in a landmine accident when she was six months old. Her mother raised four children alone and worked wherever she could. Because of that, Suhanya studied only until Grade 11.
Now she keeps encouraging her children to study. She doesn’t want them to go through what she did as a child. She often tells them how hard their father works. They work hard now so that the children can continue studying.
What she wants most is for them to study well and find good jobs one day. She said she would be very happy if they can have stable work and a good future.
One of her dreams is that they work in a bank with an income that will help them live in a complete home.