Felled by virus crisis, family of 6 struggles for hope

Hope Selangor volunteers Prema Thiyagu and Thiyagu Renugopal visit Nehru Annnamalai and Umadevi Satha Udaia Perasagam to give their family some food.

PETALING JAYA: With the country brought to a standstill by the coronavirus crisis, many jobs have collapsed, leaving people like Umadevi Satha Udaia Perasagam and her family of six out in the cold.

Umadevi, 36, was let go by the clinic where she worked as a part-time assistant because of the national shutdown under the movement control order.

Her husband, Nehru Annnamalai, 42, lost his warehouse job in December after undergoing bypass surgery. Their 14-year-old son had to drop out of school to take care of him.

The family has been struggling to put food on the table, as well as to pay the rent and get medicine for Nehru.

“The government and other local authorities must to come down and see for themselves what it’s like here,” Umadevi told FMT.

Her plight is one shared by countless part-time employees, unskilled workers and others working at non-salaried jobs. They have either been let go or have seen their income slashed since the national shutdown began on March 18 to stem the Covid-19 pandemic.

Umadevi’s family is just one of 1,200 families who have received help from the Hope Selangor charitable society, said a volunteer, Prema Thiyagu.

“We were handing out food in their community a few days ago and this boy (Umadevi’s son) shyly came up to us and said he had not eaten in days. It really broke my heart,” she said.

“I went to their home and saw they had no food in the fridge, just one cup of rice and some noodles.”

Since then, Hope Selangor has provided the family with some essential food items which should help them get by until April 15, when Umadevi said she would receive RM1,000 in government aid as part of the Bantuan Prihatin Nasional (BPN) scheme.

Four million households with incomes of RM4,000 and below will receive RM1,600 under the BPN cash handout: RM1,000 will be paid in April and RM600 in May.

The aid programme is part of an economic stimulus package amounting to RM250 million announced last month.

In the meantime, organisations like Hope Selangor are helping to feed families like Umadevi’s, as they have done for the past 15 years, providing the needy with food, groceries and medicine.

Out in the field, Hope Selangor’s volunteers are careful to keep to health security protocols such as social distancing and the use of face masks and gloves.

They distribute hundreds of packets of food every day to needy communities in Petaling Jaya, Subang, Shah Alam, Puchong and Ara Damansara.

“These people have cried out to us and we have to help them,” said Prema.

“We’re risking our lives going from house to house during this period, but we’re all right with that. Let us risk our lives. What we need is support from the public to carry out these services.” - FMT