Rescue Girls from Bonded Servitude

We have changed the name of our Indentured Daughters Program to Empowering Freed Kamlari because we accomplished what we set out to do in 2000 and have helped bring to an end the terrible practice of child slavery in Nepal known as Kamlari.

NYF is now helping thousands of these former indentured servants move towards a brighter future by offering them education, counseling, job skills, advocacy training, and economic support.

An estimated 300 Kamlari remain in servitude, and we will continue this important work to secure their freedom. Our focus now is on helping the more than 12,000 girls we have rescued build new and productive lives.

This is how we are doing it:

• We helped the young women form their own organization called the Freed Kamlari Development Forum and have taught them the skills to lead the anti-Kamlari movement. NYF gives financial support and offers training in leadership, entrepreneurship, cooperative management and organizational development.
• NYF negotiated with the Nepal government to offer scholarships to Kamlari robbed of their educations. Thousands of former child slaves are now attending school.
• Not every young woman is academic and we have a wide range of vocational trainings available for those girls who want to learn a marketable skill. After extensive career and aptitude counseling, girls can choose training in dressmaking, computer technology, cooking, poultry farming, junior engineering, and community medical assistant.
• We help entrepreneurial young women establish business cooperatives. The girls have established 37 such co-ops with more than 3,000 members. NYF funds low-interest micro loans for businesses such as poultry farming, vegetable production, carpentry, and auto-repair.
• NYF files lawsuits against employers to obtain just compensation for the freed girls and their families.

In 2014, NYF’s Empowering Freed Kamlari Program has helped to put thousands of formerly indentured daughters on the path of freedom and self-reliance.

Thank you for helping to make a brigher future for these girls!

Namaste!

Links:

• Nepal Youth Foundation

 Dear Friends,

The day of the Maghe Sankranti festival this year, January 15, 2014, was a very special one for the daughters of the Tharu community of Western Nepal. Unlike past festivals, they didn’t have to worry that their parents would sell them off as “Kamlari,’ or indentured servants.

“Kamlari Freedom Day” — celebrated with a march, and many speeches by government “thulo manchhes” (big shots) — was also special for me. It was a once-in-a-lifetime-I-never-thought-I’d-see-the-day event!

NYF ignited a movement
Since 2000, NYF has been working to eradicate this pernicious custom by liberating over 12,000 girls from bondage and bringing them home to live with their families, providing their parents with a piglet or a goat to make up for the girls’ wages, placing the liberated girls in school, and carrying out an energetic awareness campaign to turn the Tharu mothers and fathers against the practice. This, along with lawsuits against employers who persisted in enslaving their little girl servants and heavy lobbying with the government, has brought freedom not only to the present generation of child servants, but to their daughters and their daughters’ daughters as well.

As I sat on the stage for what seemed hours, I harkened back to the time of my first visit to Dang thirteen years ago, almost to the day. That time, the context was entirely different. I thought of the little orphan girl I saw that day sobbing relentlessly by her uncle’s side, begging not to be sent back to work for her callous employer — while her uncle told us, without shame, that he had sold her and her sister to pay for the cost of his son’s wedding.

Freedom for future generations
I was similarly clueless about what was being said by the many speakers on Kamlari Freedom Day, but I knew with certainty that that little girl did not spend the rest of her childhood as a kitchen slave, and that this was true of other Tharu girls of her generation and generations to come. The proof was before my eyes, as I looked down at a sea of faces of freed, assertive former Kamlari, including 30 who had just passed their college entrance examinations and were headed for higher education.

When it came my turn to speak, I wish I could have just shouted the Tharu equivalent of “You go girls!”

Thank you everyone, for supporting NYF through the years and helping to make this amazing new freedom possible.

With appreciation,

Olga Murray
Founder & Honorary President

Links:

• Nepal Youth Foundation