When Fights break a Joint Family and make Life even more difficult! - Our School Children

Today I would like to introduce you to a boy who is living just a few houses down the road in the backside of the Ashram. His name is Mohit and he is actually a cousin of Anuradha, another girl of our school to whom I introduced you last year.

Mohit is 8 years old and the youngest of four children. His eldest sister is 14, his brother 12 and his second sister 10 years old. They live with their parents and their grandmother, who also owns the house.

Mohit’s father is a mason, daily looking for work and earning about five US-Dollar per working day. His wife tells however that he gets work only for a maximum of ten days a month. That means that they don’t have a lot of money available for feeding, clothing and educating their four children!

When you enter their home through a narrow gate, you see a small shed with a cow inside to your left. A few steps further, you see a toilet house on the left, then a kind of patio on a roof and straight on, steep stairs lead down the height of a complete floor to more rooms. You can see clearly that the house was built when the road was still on a much lower level. The street came up – and they had to adjust!

You notice, already when walking in, that the wall to your right has not originally been there. It is separating something – and looking down, we know immediately what it must be: a joint family didn’t get along anymore and built a wall to create two separate houses. The house belongs to Mohit’s grandmother who lives in one of the two rooms on Mohit’s side. They have a kitchen, too, but not more space. Asking what the fights were about which led to the separation, we don’t get a clear answer. ‘The others were always fighting…’

Obviously such fights in the family make it more difficult to make ends meet. They lack the financial support of another breadwinner – and the moral and emotional support in difficult times, too!

It is a pity to see this happening and happening in such a bad way that a poor family, who doesn’t have much space anyway, builds a wall and separates their home into two tiny places! They don’t have money to move anywhere else!

These are the families that our school children come from! Mohit has been with us for two years now. He passed the second pre-school class and will now start learning in the first class in July.

You can support children like him! Sponsor a child or the food for a day!