International
On secret military island, a mother strives to raise her children normally
It’s morning in a makeshift camp on the remote British island of Diego Garcia, and Shanthi’s husband has just awoken to find their young children staring through a security fence.
As the children watch an officer and guard dog patrol the secretive island, home to a strategic UK-US military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, they make a stark remark: “Even the dogs have more freedom than us.”
“When I heard that I felt heartbroken,” he says.
It was a scene that captured their family’s predicament – they were stranded on a mysterious military fortress by accident, yet had a son and daughter, aged five and nine, to raise.