Manis Baba, a 64-year-old single mother, hopes for government action to ensure that no other person will experience the hardship she faced when she was younger and had to raise four children on her own. Recalling her past, Manis said that she was forced to auction her house and file for bankruptcy after her husband left her and the children 14 years ago.
“It’s hard to express in words the pain and the hardship I had to go through,” she told FMT. “I don’t want any other woman to have to go through that same pain.”
After the house was auctioned off, she and her four children went to live with her parents in a house built on rented land. In order to make ends meet, she said, she worked as a cleaner at a hotel and earned only RM200 a month.
In all those years of hardship, she envied people who were entitled to government subsidies or other forms of assistance. She wondered why single mothers were left out. She says this hasn’t changed. “It’s almost as if the government has completely forgotten about us single mothers. And the number of single mothers is rising.”
Single Mothers Friends’ Network coordinator Veronica Anne Ratnam, in a recent statement, noted that according to 2010 statistics gathered from the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development, there were 830,000 single mothers in the country. She said the number would have risen by now.According to a ministry official, the 2010 statistics were the latest on file.
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