Sapana’s fight against

girl trafficking in Nepal

 Buna Lama, trafficked by the monk of the Lama monastery where she worked for years as a domestic worker, was exploited in a Bombay brothel till AIDS made her return to Nepal.

By Chelo Alvarez
Photography by Jennifer Beckman

 First appeared in Planeta Humano magazine, Spain, in Spanish in 1999. What follows is a translation.

 Sapana was kidnapped from a tiny village in the Himalayas when she was 17, and forced into prostitution in Bombay until she managed to escape four years later.  At 23, she leads Shakti Samuha, an organization based in Katmandu to help stop the trafficking of girls for prostitution on the so-called Tin Road.  Not only does she have to face mafias and political corruption, but also the ignorance and taboos that forbid talking about sexual abuse.  However, Sapana has taken some traffickers to court and is ready to speak up so that what she went through does not happen ever again. 

Poster by INHURED International on trafficking prevention

Like Bombay, Sapana has changed her name.  But the difference between this fragile young woman from the remote hills of Sindhupalchowk, in the Himalayas, and Mumbai, the city known up to now as Bombay, lies in her determination to change.  For Sapana, Bombay is synonymous with hell on earth: she is one of about 7,000 women that every year find themselves crawling along the busy “Tin Road,” the path to prostitution.  The whole world seems to insist on viewing this bay favorably, as shown by the name given to it by the Portuguese four hundred years ago (bom baim for ‘good bay’), reveals how difficult it is to change habits and, particularly, beliefs.

         To blame Bombay for being one of the world’s largest hubs of child sex trade is not enough.  While it is true that Bombay decided to leave euphemisms behind and commend itself to Mumba Devi, the local goddess, by taking on her name, that amounts to a small first step.  The second one would be to acknowledge that the Kamathipura or the Falkland Road neighborhoods, are cages in which huddle over 100,000 young women who hope for a magic wand that will erase their past.  Before Bombay continues to undertake violent raids, before it creates just one more rehab center of uncertain future, the people’s conscience must be transformed.  And if Mumbai and its child sex trade ring continues to gaze at its own navel amid the waters of its seven islands, Sapana’s goal will remain to alter the way her people think: “They say that they sell us because of the poverty.  But I think what takes so many women there is ignorance.” Sapana, together with a dozen other young women repatriated from India, has created the grass-roots organization Shakti Samuha (Power Group).  Shakti Samuha is not just another NGO (non-governmental organization) fighting in isolation to stop trafficking in Nepal.  Its value resides in its raison d’être: young women forced into prostitution that have turned their pasts of suffering into a tool to forge a decent present. 

At 16, Sapana’s family arranged her marriage to her uncle. 

One year later, some distant relatives kidnapped her

and sold her to a brothel in Bombay.

The first day Sapana invited us to her new home in the outskirts of Katmandu, it was a Saturday, the holy day of the week in Nepal, a day devoted to bathing and laundry.  WOREC, Women’s Rehabilitation Center, which also houses the headquarters of Shakti Samuha, is Sapana’s new home.  In the terrace where she received us, colorful saris were drying in the sun.  A few women were applying henna to their hair, others were painting arabesques on their hands.  It felt like a regular Saturday at a college dorm, except that these students had written most of their lessons in sweat and blood.

         Sapana, 23, does not start telling her life story from the beginning.  She begins by relating how difficult it has been for her to take the traffickers to court.  She’s very proud of this despite the fact that, among other things, it meant she would not to be able to return to her village.  Sapana is one of the few exceptions to the rule, as most young women don’t dare file suit or they fail the first time they try.  “The first time I testified, the police officers laughed at me and told me why bother, who was going to believe me, what was I going to achieve, a mere girl faced with a network of dealers with money and power.” But nothing could stop her and, although three of her traffickers are still free, one other is now in jail. 

Anjana Shakya is Director of Development and Women’s Rights at INHURED International (International Institute for Human Rights, Environment and Development). She graduated in anthropology from Smith University, in the United States, and today is an expert on women’s issues in Nepal and trafficking in child prostitution in South Asia.  Her speaking engagements include international forums and the United Nations.  It was Shakya who lead us to Sapana and Shakti Samuha and the one who acted as Spana's translator.

“The underworld has created a fund to bail out every trafficker or pimp that goes to prison,” notes Shakya.  “A mix of poverty and corruption is what gives rise to trafficking,” says Jeannine Guthrie, whose research lead to Human Rights Watch/Asia’s report Rape for Profit, the most in-depth study published on the subject.  In fact, most dealers get support from the politicians in their district. Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a population of 20 million and a 60% male unemployment rate. Even though the country became a democracy in 1990, the feudal system is deeply rooted, traffickers know that politicians need money for campaigns, and the police are poorly paid.  Everyone but the young women benefits from the sex trade.

TIN ROOFS

The house on wheels

         Sapana was 17 when she fell prey to the trade.  She was the youngest of four in a farming family overwhelmed by the abuse of power on the part of the landowners in Sindhupalchowk.  Her family could only afford to send her to school until the age of 14.  At 16 her family married her to her uncle.  Her father died on her wedding day and from then on a series of unlucky events swept her to the underworld of Bombay, 1,500 miles west toward the Indian Ocean.  “I used to go out in the forest every day with a group of women neighbors, for firewood and forage.  But that day I was by myself.  I heard something and thought it was the soldiers, since I had knowingly entered the military zone, where both the forage and firewood are better.”  Other poacher foragers from her area used the same hideouts, so she wasn’t surprised to find people in the nearest one.  But these people turned out to be distant relatives that had been hounding her for months, offering her a good job in the city.  “When I refused to go with them once again, they snatched my sickle, threw my load downhill and tied my hands with the belt used to carry the load.  Then they force-fed me a coconut-and-sugar based white paste and by the time I woke up I was in a huge house.  When I looked out the window I got very scared because I’d never seen a windowpane before.  I asked at once what that long, noisy moving thing across the street was.  ‘A train,’ they answered, and I stared at that house on wheels, horrified.” They were now hundreds of miles south, in Gorakhpur, India, a ‘dress up’ stop where the traffickers ‘groom’ the young women, feeding and dressing them up so they look presentable when they get to Bombay.

Kidnappings such as Sapana’s are quite frequent.  It is also true, however, that a great number of women leave more or less of their own accord.  One has to see this region with one’s own eyes in order to understand that without electricity or roads, people live in a very simple world where good is symbolized by a good harvest, and evil—a lesser one—by the destruction that the monsoon brings.

NGOs have posted signs at bus stations warning
of the dangers of trafficking.

Don’t sell your body

Because of their naïveté the young girls can only picture cities as wondrous, futuristic places where evil does not exist.  Many parents know their daughters will end up in India, but in domestic jobs, or so they think.  A single annual harvest does not go too far, so the majority has no choice but to migrate to the capital in search of basics during the summer months, the so-called ‘hunger months.’ This forced migration is known as lahur, a tradition popularized by the seasonal recruiting of Gurkhas by the British Army.

“It’s not true that parents sell their daughters to be prostituted,” argues Kumari Gurung, a 38-year-old trafficking activist.  Gurung is the secretary of Maila Atma Nirbarta Kendra (Women’s Self-Reliance Center) which we visited with Sapana in Melamchi Pul, a village in the heart of Sindhupalchowk, a six hour drive, including three hours on a dirt road, north of Katmandu.  “They are snatched by traffickers.  If the families themselves send them there, they do it thinking they’ll work in a factory or as domestics.” Fathers or brothers entrust or ‘sell’ the young women to ‘employment agents’.  The agents exchange promises of marriages or jobs in the big cities for laughable amounts of money (from 200 to 2,000 Nepalese rupees, or $3 to $20 US dollars.)  Through the glassless windows of the mud building where we sat with Gurung, she pointed out over the tin roofs to Melamchi Pul. It is in this village where a famous brothel owner, who controls over 500 young women in Bombay, had landed a while ago in a helicopter.  Undoubtedly dazzled, six girls had followed her when she returned to India.

         We found many girls from the Chhetri caste (the highest after the Brahmin) in the Melamchi Pul school, but none from the poorest ethnic groups, as schooling among the poorest is restricted to boys, and girls end up becoming the family’s beast of burden.  “The low status of women in Nepal is the key to the problem,” explains Shakya.  “When the birth of a girl is announced, everyone offers their condolences.”

         While we were drinking the sweet and milky Nepalese tea, the Chhetri schoolgirls started to crowd together at the door, and we invited them in.  Sapana quickly improvised a cultural workshop.  Suddenly, she wasn’t a prostitute or a victim anymore, but someone strong with something important to convey: “Do you know what trafficking is all about? Do you know how AIDS gets passed on?” Forgetting the caste difference, Durga Dulas, a 15-year-old Chhetri, answers very respectfully confessing that she has heard about the girl trade but does not know anyone that has left the village because of it. She also believes you can contract AIDS by eating from the same plate.

         These young women know about Mumbai, also known as Bollywood, the Mecca of Indian cinema, solely from soap opera musicals. Katmandu is the promise of a paid job at a carpet loom.  But garment factories and carpet looms have become key locations for the recruiting or kidnapping of girls for the sex trade.  Forty percent of the 300 sex slaves interviewed in 1994 by the Nepalese NGO CWIN had been purchased in carpet factories of the Katmandu Valley.  There, 80 % of workers, children and adults alike, belong to the Tamang ethnic group, one of the poorest in Nepal and the one most in demand by Bombay’s underworld.  Women of Burmese-Tibetan minority groups, the Tamang, Sherpa, Lama, and Gurung, are prized as the most beautiful because of their ivory-colored skin and Oriental features.

         What nobody knows, because no one dares speak up, is the life that awaits these girls and young women as sex slaves.  And that’s exactly what Sapana wants to explain.  “If I go there I won’t have to endure the monsoon,’ think the girls, ‘I’ll just stay in a room and make a living that way,’ but they have no idea what ‘that way’ is about.”  Initially, Sapana got daily beatings by the garwhali  (brothel keeper) when she refused to please the men.  But after one month of physical and mental torture she gave up and started working.  Another type of torture awaited her: she had to endure all sorts of humiliations by the customers, including having abortion against their will.

It’s not easy to speak the truth and there are no recent or reliable statistics on which to prove that truth.  Even the other women at Shakti Samuha turned their back on Sapana for having disclosed too many details to us.  To be subjected to the lowest degradation amounts to losing faith in humankind.  “I couldn’t trust anyone anymore,” says Sapana.  “In the worst moments, I would pray to God, ‘Please, take me out of here.’ For me, humans were no more than animals.  You can’t see them otherwise when they treat you as if you were one.” However, Sapana is not alone: “I felt like a wilted flower, but today, thanks to people like Shakya and other friends that supported us, I feel I’m starting to come back home.”

Chelo Álvarez interviews a sex worker in a brothel in Sonagachi, Calcutta’s red light district, with the help of a social worker/interpreter

In 1997, a justice launched a harsh attack against prostitution, consequently the Bombay police “freed” 458 women from the brothels (215 of whom were Nepalese.)  Sapana was among the 128 that dared to return to their country.  Sixty percent of them were HIV positive.

         Sapana and the other young women in Shakti Samuha carry out the majority of their trafficking prevention activities in Katmandu’s garment factories.  They have visited thirty plants and shared their experiences with the women working there.  “It wasn’t that easy to go into the shops and be approved by the owners,” she says, “but they're used to us now.” In the garment factories Sapana and her young colleagues deny any promise of a better-paid job.  They explain how they can end up being sold to brothel owners for the astronomical sum of 15,000 to 55,000 Indian rupees, which will take years and years of sex work to repay.  Nor do the women ever know the price paid for them, as upon arrival, they are just told they must work an indefinite number of years to repay it and many times the trade does not stop there.

There are ‘houses’ of different categories: for girls ‘to be tamed’ (true training centers), and for those ‘already tamed’ or ‘fine’ young women, who can go to hotels and are often ‘promoted’, that is, sold time and again.  The girls don’t receive a salary, they live off tips (as low as two to five rupees) from the 10 to 30 daily clients.  Instead of diminishing, their debt only increases since the garwhali does not forgive payments (or their interest) for visits to the doctor or AIDS tests, which some clients require, even though the women don’t know what AIDS is, nor the purpose of such tests.

         Once AIDS symptoms are apparent, or lab tests claim the young woman is HIV positive, she’s immediately cast out.  The majority never finds out why.  “At first I’d get boils on my face and a high fever,” says Buna Lama. “ I’d break my piggy bank and with 13 or 14 rupees I’d get an injection that made me feel better, but at the end I got so sick I couldn’t even get up.  A Nepalese shaman that used to visit us told me that the snakes in my house were possessed with rage and that I should go back in order to appease them.   So my owner gave me 500 rupees—the other girls one or two each— and asked me never to come back.” Buna Lama is now 36 and has AIDS.  Buna was sold to a brothel in Bombay by the very lama of the monastery where she took refuge from a childhood of abuse and misery.  She had worked for eight years as the lama’s domestic.  Wretched and ill, she returned to Nepal 22 months after having being sold. 

Buna Lama, after speaking at the Beijing Women’s Conference in 1995.

Women from ethnic groups such as the Lama or Tamang are in most demand in the sex trade.  The women are held as the most beautiful because of their ivory-colored skin and Oriental features.

Buna had no idea she had AIDS until she was admitted to a hospital in Katmandu.  She weighed 75 pounds when Shanta Sapkota picked her up and took her to the Shanti Rehabilitation Center she had created for displaced women.

Younger and younger girls are being sold in the sex trade and AIDS seems to be the reason behind it.  According to the report Rape for Profit, the average age of trafficked girls in the 80s ranged between 14 and 16; in the mid 90s between 10 and 14.  Customers believe the younger the girls, the more unlikely they will be HIV positive.

When in 1997 an Indian justice launched a harsh attack against Bombay’s prostitutes, blaming them for the AIDS epidemic that was affecting the city, the police ‘freed’ 458 women, 215 of which were Nepalese.  Sapana was one of them.  Twice before she had been brought back to the brothel after a raid, but that particular time the bribes didn’t work.  Of the 215 Nepalese women, 128 dared to go back to their country but some, rejected by their own families or incapable of fitting back into the community, reverted to their former life.  Of those that returned to Nepal, 60% were HIV positive.

Once in Nepal they have to start from scratch.  “They don’t let us take anything with us, not even the few things we bought with the tips earned by selling our heart’s and body’s blood,” grieves Sapana.  She once owned a gold chain, a present from an Arab client she was fond of: “[He was] the only one that didn’t ask me to do weird stuff.  I was with him for six months.  As he was sick, he just wanted me to take care of him.  He would take me to his hotel room where I would prepare tea, give him massages and administer his medicines.  He even introduced me to his wife and children when they came to visit him.” Some say that if Bombay were to shut its doors to men from the Persian Gulf it would have to close down its brothels.

Sapana was lucky, her family welcomed her back with open arms.  Her husband-uncle even invited her to come back home, but he had remarried her cousin and Sapana didn’t want to inconvenience them.  “Besides, she explains, the family of those that sold me lives right across the street.  She has, above all, a great undertaking before her: to unravel the Tin Road.

In 1997, INHURED International organized in Kathmandu the follow-up to the 1996 Beijing Women’s Conference. Focusing on girl trafficking for prostitution purposes, the workshop successfully attracted ex-traffickers, parents of sold or kidnapped girls, lawyers, doctors, teachers and numerous survivors (trafficked women who are now free.)  It was there that Sapana discovered her mission.  “Up to that point I had limited myself to learning how to sew… I was lacking confidence to do something else…”  INHURED provided that strength encouraging Sapana to take on the leadership of the fight against trafficking.  At first hesitant, Sapana is today fully engaged.  Shakti Samuha was founded in 1997 and in May 1998 the group was able to raise the first funds to set up a women’s shelter.  The latest INHURED International project in which Sapana is involved is the publication of a comic book on trafficking, which will be used as an outreach tool for rural areas.

On our way back from Sindhupalchowk, in order to celebrate our last day together, we went to have dinner to a popular restaurant catering to westerners.  We decided to have Sapana face her last challenge: eat a pasta salad and a huge steak.  It had more calories than her normal diet gives her in one month.  But Sapana did not give up, she went on fighting with fork and knife and said:  “How can I leave anything on my dish when there are women who continue to have to sell their bodies for food?” At that very moment I could see in her cinnamon eyes a glimpse of her old home, shack #104, 11^th Street, Kamathipura, Bombay, the good bay.

 ©1999 Text by Chelo Alvarez ©1999 Photography by Jennifer Beckman Translated by Susa Oñate

EPILOGUE