Dear Friends:

Life is never dull here in Nepal. Inconvenient, sometimes, it's true. Right now we have only eight hours of electricity a day, half in the middle of the night, the streets are strewn with 17 days worth of garbage because the people who live near the dump are blocking the road to enforce their somewhat outrageous demands, and the traffic in Kathmandu is impossible because the streets are constantly blocked by demonstrators. It's pretty clear that Nepal can use some of the "yes we can" spirit that pervades the U.S. at the moment.

Nevertheless, compared to the joy and fulfillment I get from my life here, these are minor nuisances. I just returned from the festival in West Nepal where young girls are sold by their parents to work as servants in the homes of strangers. We have been working to end this practice since 2000. In the process, we have rescued about 3,000 girls, brought them home to live with their families and placed them in school. In each case, the family received a piglet or a goat to compensate for the loss of their daughter's labor, and we enroll the girl in school and keep her there at our own expense.

But the practice persists in several districts in West Nepal. We spent some time in the beautiful but terribly poor villages of the Tharu ethnic community, visiting the parents who sold their daughters. Honestly, when you see the mothers, exhausted, malnourished, desperate to feed their many young children, it's hard to blame them.

The employers who buy the girls, however, are something else. Some of them are journalists, teachers, government officials, or working at a handsome salary for international agencies. It was striking to see the difference between the situation in the Dang District, where we have been running a dynamic and successful anti-bonding awareness campaign, and the Kailali District, where we have not yet started our program.

In Dang, there was a march by thousands of rescued girls (me, too) chanting, carrying banners, and distributing leaflets opposing the practice. The Chief District Officer (in effect, the governor of the district), made a speech declaring Dang a zone free of bonded child laborers.

But in Kailali, where we have not yet started to work, the streets were filled with men on motorcycles from all over the country making deals with the parents of girls. They worked openly and without shame, bargaining, promising, and whisking the children away when the deals were concluded. The girls themselves, frightened, not knowing where they were being taken, seemed to realize that their childhoods were at an end. There was no sign of any embarrassment in these transactions - in fact, some of the brokers expressed pride that they could buy labor at such a cheap price.

This year, we made considerable progress on an official level toward our goal of eradicating the custom. In a lead-up to the festival, we brought 400 liberated girls from their villages to Kathmandu to march, protest, and educate the residents of the big city about the practice. All the newspapers covered the event. A delegation of girls met with the Prime Minister, the President, the Home Minister, and other officials. All promised to bring the matter to the attention of the Cabinet to investigate the practice, to strengthen the law against bonding, and to put together a package to educate returned girls. All well and good. But not having been born yesterday and having witnessed over the years that in Nepal (and other countries, too), promises made by government officials for reforms are usually not met, we know we still have our work cut out for us.

I will write again soon. Thanks for all your help through the years. Please help NYOF to eradicate the practice of bonding children.

Warm regards,
Olga