After her father’s death – and her mother unable to provide food – Sushila, 7, moved in with her grandparents
WORDS: SARAH FINLEY
HELPING HAND APPEAL 2023
Sushila has to wake up extra early on a school day. After she’s packed her school bags and says goodbye to her grandparents she begins the long eight kilometre walk to school.
The seven year-old walks through the woodlands, along winding roads and has to cross a river in order to get her education. Then, after a long day at school, she starts her eight km descent home.
“I don’t get tired as I’m used to it now,” says Sushila. “But if I didn’t get Mary’s Meals at lunchtime I would struggle to have the energy to walk home.”
She admits food is scarce in her household but sometimes eats at home, while other days she just relies on the meals she receives at school.
Sushila’s school, called Shanti Niketan, is based in a remote Indian village of Dabri in the Latehar district of Jharkhand, and as we arrive we see it’s surrounded by woodland and lakes, with no houses for a kilometre or two.
But the children – dressed all in blue, and some without shoes – don’t seem to mind and greet us with big smiles.
As we sit down with Sushila, who wears her hair back off her face in plaits, and red ribbons in bows, she tells us how her life changed a couple of years ago.
An only child, her mother, Basanti Devi, was a housewife and they lived off the wages of Sushila’s father, Baiju Oraon. However, tragedy struck at work.
“My dad was working in a field, harvesting crops, but one day when he walked through the field he got bitten by a snake,” says Sushila.
“They brought him home and he was about to go to hospital – but we were too late and he died at home.”
He was bitten by a tiny poisonous snake called a Krate, and died within hours of being bitten. Distraught, her mother found it hard to cope with the death and became depressed.
Without her father’s income they started to go without food. Sushila doesn’t remember much about her father but admits she misses him and, as tears start to fall down her face, she says the one memory she has is “sitting in his lap and playing”.
Unable to cope with Sushila on her own, her mother sent her to live with her grandparents and uncle.
Her mother now lives and work
