No one is asking whether we are eating or drinking’:
Her husband works with the Civil Defence Force. She also cares for her aged mother and a differently-abled sister. And her brother has come home after losing his job owing to Covid-19.
She cooked rice, long beans and dried fish for breakfast. And while it was nearly three when the Sunday Times telephoned her, she hadn’t eaten lunch because she was too busy inspecting the damage to her paddy field.
“I took a Rs 100,000 loan and Rs 30,000 of it went towards good seed paddy,” Kusuma said. “We grew four acres and if the rains had come, we would have had a good harvest.”
“Up to now, nobody has come our way with rations,” she continued. “Nobody from the Government has asked whether we are eating or drinking or what problems we have.”
Isuru Sohan is the Anuradhapura Project Coordinator for an NGO called Good Neighbours. He was sticking out the curfew in his home town of Trincomalee. He made phone calls to contacts in rural villages and found that many are able to manage because they have harvested their paddy and had sufficient provisions for the moment.
But they were concerned about the future. Everything, they said, depended on how long the curfew would continue to disrupt their daily lives.
“There are villages I work in where people would regularly eat just two meals a day,” Isuru said. “There are families where the husband and wife have found other spouses and left their children for grandparents to take care of. There is nobody to feed them. There are also single-parent households.”
Daily-paid work in such areas could mean anything from harvesting and planting paddy to picking ‘tibbatu’ and making bricks. In many parts of the country, Covid-19 is in danger of exacerbating poverty.