A UK sculptor teaching Nepalese girl trafficking victims

This afternoon Bev and I went to visit our latest British volunteer, sculptor Rebecca Hawkins (www.rebeccahawkinssculpture.co.uk/currentProjects/projects.php) who has just last week joined the art workshop for former circus girls. While men outside the building continued constructing a kiln, we found Rebecca introducing the girls to the basics of form, through teaching still life techniques. The girls were all sitting around a central display so that each had a different perspective and could therefore not copy one another - copying being a Nepali trait.

Rebecca will be with us until April and during that time we hope to overlap mosaic and sculpture techniques - literally adding another dimension to our work!

Organ theft

This time last year along with ChildLine India we conducted a rescue operation at The New Raj Kamal Circus in Uttar Pradesh, north India. Twenty girls were freed from modern day slavery and sexual abuse (see the film on my post of 11th December). At the time another Indian NGO rather hijacked the legal action against the circus owner, Lakhan Chaudhary, who allegedly was himself raping the girls. It all went quiet and the NGO refused to reply to our enquiries about progress of the case. At the end of last year it emerged that nothing had been done and Chaudhary was still a free man.

Working with ChildLine we are now going to attempt to prosecute Chaudhary and 14 of the girls that we freed are willing to give evidence against him. These witnesses are much more relaxed and confident than they were a year ago and for the first time have just revealed a further tragedy to add to the catalogue of horrors from that circus. A seven year old Nepali girl performer allegedly had a kidney removed from her and she died shortly afterwards. Apparently her parents were summoned to the circus and paid off in return for their silence.

If proven, this will be the first case of organ theft that we have come across in relation to child trafficking to the circuses.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

The girls that we rescue from the circuses are at risk of going from one form of exploitation to another. In the circuses the owners who buy them off the agents see them as being a mere commodity whose sole value is their exotic looks and performance in scant clothing that attracts less than discerning audiences. And I have written previously about the extremes of abuse that they have to endure within the circus. The trouble is that the families who sold them off are as predatory as the circuses and only tolerate their presence post-rescue if they can get some early financial return back off them. The girls are caught in the middle and to a certain extent, so are we as we try to help and rehabilitate them.

An illustration of this happened two evenings ago when a father of one of the girls who has been on our art workshop turned up at our premises and kicked up a very public rumpus. He began shouting about how his daughter, Laxmi, was old enough to work and why was she not earning money? After a bitter exchange with our local staff he left, taking the girl with him (the father’s say is final in Nepalese culture). Very sadly Laxmi had been the top student on the course and if the idiot had left her be she’d have been earning a great deal of money within a couple of months.

So often the decision-making of these parents is fuelled by alcohol abuse. It is the need for the money that supports their dependence that often inspires them to send the girls to the circus in the first place. And when they’re back they’d rather see them earn a pittance working in the fields if it pays for a bottle or two of cheap spirits.

It is very likely that this incident could be repeated in the near future as two other girls from Laxmi’s village are on the course and their fathers may well follow suit. We are sending our field workers to see if we can reason with the parents. At the same time we will now merge the training of the workshop with the pre-existing workplace of “Himalayan Mosaics” so that the trainee girls boost the training allowance that we had been paying with earnings based upon sales of mosaics. It is sobering to reflect that our decision has indirectly been prompted by a drunken parent.

Fat and thin

Last year one of the Trust’s volunteers at the start of a return stint in Nepal was told by one of the children how she looked much better than on her previous visit, adding that she was now “so much fatter”. The subject of a lady’s weight is not a taboo subject over here and no one, even a stranger, seems to be inhibited about broaching the subject. A friend once told me how she had been asked at a Kathmandu police vehicle checkpoint how she could be so fat while her husband (who was behind the wheel) was so thin. Similar intrusive comments are reported in an article in this month’s edition of the locally-published UN Women’s Organisation in Nepal journal “The Mirror”. A Nepali lady, who has spent a great deal of time abroad, tells how she was once asked “kasto dublo, jugako ausahdi khannoopurryo?” (you are so thin, have you tried de-worming?). She added that fat people can expect comments like “Alee kum khanee gurra, sungur jasto motayero phootnoo aateeyow” which translates as “better start eating less, you are fat like a pig, you might just burst”.

This all could be construed as being merely an amusing, quaint lack of subtlety. But worryingly from a childcare provider’s point of view, I feel it also reflects a huge lack of sensitivity in this pass-remarkable, unsophisticated society. Our goal of integrating disabled children and young people with mainstream society and reintegrating the survivors of trafficking and sexual abuse becomes all the more challenging in this milieu. At the end of the day, there’s only so much that we can do.

The Fourth of January

Today is the ninth anniversary of my first wife Esther's tragic death. Although I always tell myself that it's "just another day" it does always still loom ahead of me over the Christmas and New Year celebrations that are going on all around.

It would probably come as no surprise if I were to state that it felt like it had happened just yesterday. And if I do sit down and write about the subject (as I did for the link article below "The Esther Benjamins Trust in my own words") then it suddenly does become very raw and the tears can readily flow. However if truth be told it seems like it occurred ages ago most likely because so very much has happened in the meantime. I didn't pause for much reflection in the immediate aftermath of Esther's suicide, choosing instead to take on a huge challenge in her memory. A challenge that has kept me fully occupied ever since. This has given me a great deal of peace and a badly-needed sense of purpose. With hindsight it was exactly the right way to proceed.

Vive la France

I am in the process of moving home at the moment from Godawari (which is 20km outside Kathmandu) to the town centre. My former home is being transformed into the basis of a rehabilitation centre which in the short term will host our art workshops. Ultimately I'd like my Trust to be able to purchase and extend the premises so that we can cater for up to 100 girl victims of trafficking as opposed to the current 50 or so. That will be an expensive prospect; property prices in Kathmandu have doubled in the last three years and I wouldn't be surprised if the final capital project cost doesn't run to £250k. We'll have to raise that from scratch.

I drove out to the house this morning and en route passed through a village called Harisiddhi. In the middle of this traditional Newar village a large red banner proclaimed "Long live Nepal France friendship". Presumably they've just had a French donor, or potential donor, visting and the locals like to have an opportunity to indulge in a bit of this kind of shallow flattery. It is a rather ironic slogan though considering that the French government has just recently refused the nominated (Maoist) Nepalese Ambassador to France.

From time to time Nepal sees a mass release of prisoners to mark a special occasion - like for example the former King's birthday. Personally I would prefer to see a celebration taking the form of a good party, but each to their own. Yesterday the papers said that they'd be freeing early no less than 800 prisoners from jail, just because the prisons are overcrowded. However prisoners from nine special categories would not be eligible. These include serious offences like rape and human trafficking, but I was bemused to read that the others include corruption and spying on the government. I can't imagine that anyone inside or outside hasn't been guilty of the former while I am surprised that anyone would be remotely interested in committing the latter crime. One other of the special categories was "helping prisoners to escape"; this seems to be a particularly pointless crime in the light of these regular amnesties. All you have to do is sit and wait rather than to embark upon digging tunnels.

We've run out of money!

Happy New Year.

Nepal has now added a dearth of bank notes to the other recent shortages - petrol, cooking gas etc - that we've had to work around. I went to four ATM machines in central Kathmandu today to try to withdraw cash before finding one that would allow me to extract local currency to a value that was worth more than a few pounds. And my Standard Chartered Bank card was cancelled in the process, presumably because of my temerity in persisting.

The things one takes for granted...