Ms. Safoo, the mother of three children, cannot understand how she was born to poor family, grew under poverty and continuously struggling for survival. She always calls it a fortune and leaves it up to nature.
She lives in village Photo Bheel 25 kilometers from Mirurkhas city, with mostly farmer families work in agriculture fields as sharecropper.
Ms. Safoo’s husband Dedo remains busy in agriculture field from dawn to dusk to earn livelihood. The family works together to ease their children. Obviously, illiteracy, poverty and inflation have trapped them badly.
Ms. Safoo had given birth to a severely malnourished baby, who could not survive and died within 15 days of her birth. This is because the poverty and insufficient food have impacted horribly on the health of her newborn baby.
“During the last days of my pregnancy, I needed rest and nutritious food, which doctors advised me to have for safe delivery of healthy baby,” she said. However, due to unaware of bad effects of malnourishment she continued her routine work without getting enough nutritious food and falls victim to this ignorance. She could not realize its consequences and lost her baby at initial stage.
She was obligated to cook meal for her children and husband; washes clothes, keeps clean her sprawling house and fetches water through traveling a long distance from hand pump. This kind of extensive work contributed to ruin her health.
In her understanding, the role she was assigned decided by her parents when she was unmarried that continued after her marriage. Given such state of her life, she was selected through assessment by SRPO team under Accelerated Action Plan (AAP), a program of Government of Sindh, to have five goats and 10 poultry birds to help reduce stunting and malnutrition.
She was among the lucky women, who desperately needed support. “I couldn’t believe that how my name was selected to be given goats and poultry birds. I never imagined to have my own goats and poultry birds to escape the abject poverty and malnourishment,” she describes.
Poultry birds lay eggs daily, which are supportive to provide proper died to her children. She was optimistic about gifted assets to have milk and eggs to feed her children and all family members, who need this nutritious food sources. Now it is up to them that they can replace goats with healthy ones to get more milk.
In nay untoward incident in which their goat falls prey to viral infections the family receives help from SRPO team to provide cure to animal.
She was happy to tell that her two goats got pregnant. She has also bought another goat from her saving. Now she has 5 female goats and one male goat. Her children have access to milk and eggs to keep them healthy, she expressed joyfully.
