Selling and buying people

Human trafficking is a global phenomenon that is driven by demand and fuelled by poverty and unemployment (UNFPA 2006). According to the UNFPA, four million women, children and men are trafficked globally in a year. South East Asian and South Asian countries are the homes of the largest number of internationally trafficked persons.

Photo: Umita form Lalitpur District in Nepal Red Cross posing for a Anti Human Trafficking Campaign in Norway when she was a Youth Delegate in Norway 2 years ago.

The situation in Nepal
It has been estimated that every year around 12,000 Nepalese girls and women are trafficked to India from Nepal. According to a report of Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare, around 40,000 girls are working in cabin and dance restaurants in Kathmandu. Out of them, half are victims of sexual exploitation and trafficking. Nepalese girls and women are highly demanded in the sex industry in India.



Nepal Red Cross' work
Norwegian Red Cross is funding six districts in their work to enable youth to combat HIV, trafficking and social discrimination. A special project for me as a Youth Delegate in this setting is the project in Dhading district, just north of Kathmandu, which is supported by the Norwegian Red Cross Youth. In Dhading the focus is on early warning, giving knowledge to the poor people living there on how they can get information on their employer and anti stigma. The project is mainly focused on youth age 12-25, as they are the people in the risk zone of being trafficked in this area.


Early intervention
In Dhading, Red Cross is responsible for selling of the application form for passport as an income generating activity. While people come at Red Cross to ask for application form for passport, an information package consisting of anti trafficking,
HIV prevention, tips for safer migration messages will be provided to them. This prior information may help to the applicant to assess risk of migration, nature of job and reliability of the sending company which eventually may help to take appropriate decision for migration.

“Røde Kors Ungdom” in Nepal
Norwegian Red Cross Youth supports the project in Dhading. This year’s project is mainly funded with the help from two schools in Norway’s fund raising campaign, namely Børstad and Sarpsborg Ungdomsskole. The project was started by the first Youth Delegates in Nepal, and all the delegates have been following the project at some point or another.

Our work so far
We have been so lucky to visit a anti human trafficking project in Palpa, the annual review and planning meeting for these projects last week and this weekend we had a workshop at our own district in Lalitpur, to get started with focusing on the problem in our own district. This is new work for both us and them, but we had a very good workshop where we did both a small baseline survey and introduced a few low budget activities to the 18 youth participating. We have already scheduled a second meeting to plan the implementation of their ideas in their Youth Circles, and I have to say is both inspiring and motivating. I'll update you as soon as I can! :)

Photo: The participants at the workshop interviewed people in the streets of Patan to get an overview of what people knew about the problem. They also asked if they thought this could be something that might affect their family and what should be done to stop the problem. The answers were used when we worked on the individual project proposal for each Youth Circle.

Lost in translation?

“I copied and pasted all your blog posts into Google Translator,” says Nirajan. I can take a hint and will from now on write more in English. But I have to admit that, as all the participants at our trainings and workshops tells us; it is not as easy to express thoughts, feelings and reflections in English, but as they take the challenge, so will I!

So much has happened since last my last blog post, and it is time for a short sum up. I also take Nirajan, next year’s Youth Delegate to Norway from Nepal, wish seriously and will try to communicate in a language people that are important in my everyday life in Nepal also can understand.

Our biggest festival

24^th December 2009: Happy to Christmas! is written on the cake our co-workers at head quarter has ordered to mark our biggest festival and celebrate with eating oranges and handing out presents. We talk a bit about what traditions are important in our families, I tell them that every year my family goes and has dinner at each other almost every day for one week, we eat and eat and eat. They compare it with Dashain, their biggest festival that we celebrated in October, where main focus is on food and family.

4 in the morning – the end of December

31^st December 2009: Linn Synnøve and I are safe asleep in a bed in Tikkabairab. We wanted to do a new year trek from Kathmandu to Nagarkot the southern end of the Valley was the plan initially, but that suddenly changed when we found out that the map has no walking tours and what was “just a few minutes” turned out to be two hours, and that was particularly frustrating when it turned out that we missed a turning point and walked two hours in the wrong direction.

We met nice people all the way, helpful or not, we have some great memories from the trek :)

Here we're trying to find the way...

Oh no! Wrong way! But are we sad? Not at all! Lynn Synnøve even takes a few extra knee bending to show how much fun it it to walk just for fun!

The women in Tikkabairab

First night we had nowhere to stay and decided to try our luck in a nearby restaurant. Three lovely women were working there and they rented a room. They offered us one of their beds, and after eating dal bhat tarkari and drinking hot Tomba, we squeezed together five persons in a small room in about 10m2 with walls covered by stunning beautiful Bollywood actresses and one big white house with fence by the lake. That night it rained for the first time in two months in Kathmandu Valley, and I woke up several times during the night to put on warmer and warmer clothes and thanking these three hospital women in my heart for taking us into their rented home and sharing a small part of their life with us. The next morning we went to the local photographer to document our stay in Tikkabairab.

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Enabling Youth – enabling us

In our bi-monthly reports, the first part we as Youth Delegates are to answer is: “Describe your main activities during this period (including preparation, your participation & major achievements). – Any challenges?” Next report will focus on giving training in IHL, arranging Human Trafficking workshop and participating on Red Cross meetings organised by Nepal Red Cross. A common challenge is communication with spoken words. Body language goes only so far, but spending three days with two women and one of their sons at our field trip to Myadhi last week did wonders for both understanding and trying to communicate in Nepali. At this annual review and planning meeting for all the Norwegian supported Youth projects to Enable Youth to combat HIV, human trafficking and social discrimination, it was nice to see that the number of participants were equally men and women. As a women, I was immediately included in the women activities; going to temple in the morning as a big group, eating at their table, going to bed when the child in our room was tired. I wish my Nepali was better, I wonder how it is to be a women in Red Cross in Nepal – the woman with a son had no choice but bring him and the other women told me that she had never married, she did not want to. I was in a position to talk to them and try to understand their world, their way of living, their hopes and dreams in life. But I was not able to communicate what I wanted to know and some of what they told me, I was not able to understand. Some because of language, some because my world and way of living is so very different from theirs, some because I don’t dare to ask – am I frightened by the cultural differences, of stepping wrong, of making a fool out of me or out of them? This is for me to find out. This I think is one of my biggest challenges at the moment. What is lost in translation?

Participants at the Annual planning and review meeting

International Humanitarian Law in Lalitpur

Last weekends Red Cross and International Humanitarian Law training was a big success. With 18 participants and 20 intense hours, we trained trainers and planned for starting IHL dissemination already next week! Oh, it feels so good to be a Youth Delegate :)