Interview of former circus girls

I returned to Kathmandu last evening after a sobering visit to our branch office in Hetauda in the central south of Nepal. I had been in the company of Dean Nelson, South Asia correspondent with the UK's largest Sunday newspaper, The Sunday Times. Dean wanted to interview five of the girls who had been released from The Raj Mahal Circus (see my post of 16th June) and were now back home in the vicinity of Hetauda. The girls were more relaxed than at the time of their rescue and were now speaking freely. One girl told how she'd gone to the circus at the age of 5 and had spent 12 years inside. After her years of imprisonment the rural poverty of home seemed like a wondrous world to her. Another girl told us how they only received pocket money in return for their arduous and dangerous working routine - she guessed she'd been given a total of about £8 in the ten years that she'd been trapped inside the circus. The girls talked of their performances, the most frightening of which was the act in which they have their hands tied behind their back to be spun around the inside of the big top holding on by their teeth to a piece of cloth at the end of a rope. One of the girls had fallen and was lucky to survive. This accident literally grounded her for three months.

Most sobering was the girls' descriptions of the deaths inside the circus. A girl had died from jaundice and her body had been buried somewhere. A few months later her mother turned up to see her daughter and was understandably distraught to learn of her daughter's fate. She refused to accept the circus' offer of financial "compensation". Two lads had died as a result of a trapeze fall. Their bodies were cremated and that was the end of them. They recounted how one boy had escaped from the circus to later return of his own volition. His punishment was a public beating (used as a deterrent for the rest of the troupe) that left his limbs broken. He was then removed from the circus. The girls believe he was left on a railway track.

The face of modern day slavery is ugly in the extreme. I hope we can continue to break the hold of the circuses over the children that they abuse and I look forward to our next rescue in August. The coverage in The Sunday Times (expected to be on 6 July) will hopefully help us to raise the funds that we so desperately need to continue our fight.

Returning home via Simra airport I was ready for some amusement after three hours' worth of very grim stories. There was some levity when I saw the garden outside the departure lounge. Tiny as it was, a huge and inappropriately-sited noticeboard proclaimed this (rather weed infested) garden's maintenance to be a joint venture between a soap manufacturer (Vatika) and the Civil Aviation Office. Obviously the scale of the task was too much for one of these to be able to fund it in isolation. And the ostentatious signboard guaranteed to undermine any aesthetic improvement that might have gained through the gardener's labours.