A glimpse into Nepal and Charimaya's Story

Recently, 9 community members from Virginia and Pennsylvania joined David Radcliff and New Community Project on a trip to Nepal in order to learn about the multifaceted face of trafficking in communities there.  David has been visiting the beautiful country for 10 years now.  It is a place that boasts some of the most amazing mountains in the world and some of the richest cultural diversity and history anywhere.  Buddhist temples seemingly accompany Hindu shrines on every hillside and city sidewalk.  Terraced fields full of rice, sorghum, potatoes, and mustard cascade down every lowland mountainside in the rural areas and vast glacial moraines carry silt and sand from the high frozen whitecaps to the tropical forests of the Kathmandu Valley.  Singing bowls, meditative mandalas, and bells hearken to the rich religious fabric of Nepal while Yak wool and Pashmina drape every neck and storefront with rich colors and textures from the heavily-cloaked animals that roam the hillsides. 

Like so many other developing countries of the world, incredible beauty and richness is often accompanied intimately with extreme poverty and exploitation.  Nepal is no different.  Situated between China and India, Nepal is caught in a tug of war involving politics, trade, and devastating disregard for human liberty that we in the West take for granted. 

Charimaya is a 38-year old woman who was lured from her rural farming village at 16 by a friend who wanted to take her and her friends to Kathmandu to visit the city.  Two years later, she was living in the Red Light District in New Delhi after surviving suicide attempts, gang rape, and torture.  Finally she fled from her prison, confronted her trafficker, and stood on the streets of Kathmandu telling her story to whomever would pass by.  She didn’t have a cent to her name, and people beat her to quiet her, until one day, she clung to the coat of a politician and pleaded with him to listen to her story. 

Charimaya’s story got heard.  She successfully prosecuted her trafficker, and started Shakti Samuha, a women’s groups for the survivors of sex trafficking.  This woman who had nothing, and who had lost everything had found the courage and strength to not only regain her life, but to bring perpetrators to justice, and start the world’s first organization for the survivors of sex trafficking.  As we said goodbye to Charimaya, she stood beside a poster on the wall where Hillary Clinton hugged her and presented her with the “2011 Hero to end Modern Day Trafficking Award.” 

Trafficking continues to increase.  In Nepal, between 10,000 and 12,000 women are taken into Indian brothels every year.  Even more are trafficked to Middle Eastern countries where they are subjected to dehumanizing work and treatment.  At least 20.9 million adults and children are bought and sold worldwide into commercial sexual servitude, forced labor and bonded labor, and the numbers continue to increase. 

Of the lessons and reminders our group got while visiting survivors and associated organizations in Nepal, the most important was that the issue of trafficking is multi-faceted and incredibly complex.  In order to reduce trafficking, to put a stop to young girls being lured from their farm fields, the world has to work to give them incentives to stay in the first place, and has to convince their governments to prosecute and root-out traffickers where they operate.  Right now, money and power weighs heavier on the side of trafficking, but it is up to us to speak up for those who cannot.  As a wise woman once said, “Preach the truth as if you have a million voices, for it is silence that kills the world.”