Life is bleak for 8-year-old Subodh, a loving child in India who longs to help his widowed mother.

“My mother tries her best to take good care of me,” he says.

She gets up at 6 in the morning to cook for him, then she goes to the field. “We don’t have our own land because we don’t have money,” he says, “so she works on other people’s fields.”

No matter the weather, she works eight hours in the field so that she can buy food.

“The day she falls sick and doesn’t work we don’t have money and there is no food,” he says.

Their house is made of straw and bricks and she doesn’t have the money to make a sturdy house. When it rains, the water comes in and makes everything wet.

As his mother’s only child at home, Subodh worries about her. “I want to see my mother happy, with a smile on her face. When my mother cries, it hurts to watch. I want to help, but how can I? I am only 8," he says.

“My mother wants me to study and be something great,” says Subodh. “I wish I could be a doctor sometimes but I don’t know if I can be one.”

Photo©2015 World Vision, Annila Harris