KATMANDU, Nepal — Frail and weak, 21-year-old Pasan Shelpa had hoped that if she went abroad to work — as her three older sisters did — it would help better the family’s lot.
“I saw how it had helped families in my village,” Shelpa told MintPress News. “I wanted to make my parents happy.”
According to the International Labour Organization, more than 2 million Nepalese men and women work abroad as domestic workers, construction workers or in other low-skill jobs.
The remittances sent by Nepalese workers abroad account for 21 percent of Nepal’s gross domestic product, making overseas work the backbone of the national economy, according to the ILO.
Hailing from a village in the Sindhupalchok district, one of the country’s least developed districts, Shelpa is the fifth of nine children of a smallholder farmer. She dropped out of school when she was in the third grade to help at home and in the fields where they grow maize, millet and potatoes, and raise yaks.
“Every year, anywhere between 1,500 to 1,800 Nepalese men migrate for work, usually from rural areas, for bettering their prospects,” Manju Gurung, a former migrant worker who heads Pourakhi, a non-governmental organization offering support to female migrant workers, told MintPress. “These are documented, but the same number, if not more, is migrating via India as undocumented workers.”
All the members of Pourakhi, which was formed in 2003, are former migrant workers.
“We’re focusing on financial literacy for migrants and their families who receive remittances, but most is spent on luxurious items and not invested in productive ways,” Gurung explained.
Enticed by greener pastures
Four months ago, Shelpa’s family approached the local recruitment agent who had previously sent her sisters to Kurdistan, via India, and who managed all the paperwork for her illiterate family. She was hired for $350 per month.
Everything seemed to be in order — or at least, as much as it could be, since she was going illegally — but the three months that she stayed in India turned out to be her worst nightmare.
“There were hundreds of us living together,” she said hesitantly, unwilling to divulge much information.
Her eyes welled with tears as she began to recount the ordeal in which she was continually raped by her male Nepalese counterparts while waiting in transit. Once in Kurdistan, she was unable to carry out the work she was hired to do and her employers sent her home.
Currently staying at the government’s Emergency Shelter Home for women in Katmandu, which is managed by Pourakhi, Shelpa is receiving psychosocial and medical treatment before she is sent home. Her family will also need counselling so they do not turn her away.
“She is badly shaken, and when she came, she had bruises all over her body. She was getting her tuberculosis treatment prior to leaving but had left the course mid-way,” Satra Kumari, a nurse at the shelter, explained.
Foreign work takes its toll
An ever-ready smile on her face, Kumari has dealt with many women — “some with physical wounds which are easy to heal,” but others who have “developed mental illnesses.”
“They are homesick, missing kids, suffer from language barrier in an alien country, survived on less sleep and less food, and generally treated less than human,” the nurse said. “I think the Gulf countries, and in particular Saudi Arabia, are the worst countries to work in. They treat the foreign help worse than animals.”
Nodding in agreement, Goma Ghimree, 42, advised, “Go to Israel and the West, where you are considered a human being, and go officially.”
Ghimree, now a client support officer at the Emergency Shelter Home, worked in Tel Aviv for five years. She earned $1,000 per month by taking care of 95-year-old woman.
Gurung said one of the reasons for such treatment is that domestic workers are not covered under the employment and labor laws of the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries — including Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — where about 200,000 Nepalese migrant women are working as housemaids.
With much bad news coming from Qatar in recent years, especially about Nepalese workers, Nepal’s government has banned women under 30 from seeking employment in the Gulf and it has restricted travel for those going there for domestic work.
The ban was imposed with a view to protect women from the mental, physical and sexual exploitation they face while working in dismal conditions, but Gurung says the ban has created other problems.
“They say they want to protect the women from being exploited, but they are curtailing their economic rights, right of mobility and right to choice of occupation,” Gurung pointed out.
Instead, she says, it is the government’s responsibility to inform the workers of the risks and challenges they may face, as well as their rights and responsibilities.
Many long to go abroad again
Last month, with assistance from International Organization of Migration and the Embassy of Nepal in Cairo, Pourakhi succeeded in bringing home 37 Nepalese women from Lebanon — including some who were returning home after a decade or more.
They had gone to Lebanon as documented workers and encountered abusive working conditions. Somewhere along the line, they managed to escape these poor conditions. But this escape came at a price: they lost their work status, their wages and — most importantly — their passports, which they could not return home without.
According to “Into the Unknown,” a report on Nepalese migrant domestic workers in Lebanon published this month by Anti-Slavery International, there are an estimated 200,000 migrant domestic workers in Lebanon, including an estimated 12,000 from Nepal. Most complain of slave-like working conditions, including no days off and physical and sexual abuse.
Undeterred, many have found ways to work around the system. Some founded a domestic help agency for part-time workers, while others found work in the informal sector, earning much more than they were getting paid by their former employers.
Gurung, who interviewed many of these migrant domestic workers, said those in the informal sector earned as much as $1,500 a month. “They all looked very posh to me and not particularly worse for the wear.”
Many, like Shelpa, hope to go abroad again.
“The fact that they all want to work abroad is an indication of the few job opportunities people have in Nepal,” Gurung said.
“Migration is a natural phenomenon. You can’t stop it,” she added, emphasizing that economic empowerment is an important factor for women seeking work abroad.
Babita Basnet, a senior Nepalese journalist and women’s rights activist, offers a profile of a typical migrant Nepalese woman: “She will be from a rural area, married or widowed. She wants to better her life and finds agriculture cumbersome.”
Basnet notes that as modern methods of cultivation are not promoted, subsistence farming is losing its appeal. “They know they can earn a hundred times more if they work abroad,” she added.
But this work comes at a social cost. “Once one of the spouses goes abroad for work, you can be sure the marital relationship will get affected,” the journalist said.
Gurung agreed, noting, “Extramarital affairs are quite common.”