Woman's idea saves thousands of Nepalese girls

Meredith May, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/22/MNVJ11RHRQ.DTL
(07-21) 20:17 PDT -- Olga Murray of Sausalito had been volunteering for five years in Nepal, helping abandoned and disabled children get an education, when she read something in the newspaper that she couldn't believe.

In the southern Dang district, rural Tharu farming families trapped in extreme poverty - earning less than a dollar a day - were making horrible sacrifices: selling their daughters as domestic slaves to wealthy Kathmandu families for $35 to $75.

"These girls are 7, 8, 9 and 10, and no one was checking up on them," said Murray, 83. "I was shocked."

That was in 1989. Her solution to break the practice has since made her a philanthropic legend in the area.

Her ingenious idea? Piglets.

Murray asked the Tharu village fathers to keep their daughters home and send them to school instead of selling them at the annual Maghe Sakranti Festival every January. In exchange, families could raise the pigs and sell them for the same amount they could fetch for their daughters. Murray's nonprofit organization, the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation, also would pay for the girls' school expenses. Plus, it would kick in a kerosene lamp and 2 liters of kerosene a month - coveted items in an area without electricity.

It was an experiment based on Murray's understanding of Nepali culture after living there off and on for five years and sponsoring the education of orphans and street children. She knew pork is a prized meat and that for some families, selling a daughter was the only way to afford food for the rest of the family.

Of the 37 families she and her Nepalese counterpart Som Paneru approached that first year, 32 took the deal. Some asked for and received a goat instead of a pig.

Murray and Paneru have since steered 3,000 girls away from slavery and all but eradicated the long-held tradition of indentured servitude in the Tharu village.

Instead of spending their lives washing, baby-sitting, cooking and - in the worst cases - working in brothels, the girls are getting an education. Many have also become vocal about their hardships, unveiling the horrors of domestic slavery on radio programs and in street plays and marches. Some have formed a watchdog committee to visit the Tharu village and monitor the bus stops to make sure girls aren't being sold.

"The local schools are full of former kamlaris (girl slaves), and the size of the classrooms are swollen, and girls are outnumbering boys," Paneru wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. "We've already built over 35 new classrooms, but the need is still not fully met."

It's illegal to employ children younger than 14 outside the home in Nepal, but in Tharu, one of the country's poorest villages, some fathers persist. In those cases, Murray, an attorney who worked for 37 years helping write opinions for two California Supreme Court chief justices in San Francisco, files a lawsuit in Nepal.

Typically, a warning letter persuades the father to keep his daughter home, Murray said. She has had to go to court only a few times, and she has won every time.

Selling girls has become shameful in Dang, and if it's done, it's done in secret now, Murray said.

The girls are resilient and have become fierce activists. The only time their voices quaver, Murray said, is when they talk about their little sisters.

"At rallies, or on the radio, they promise out loud that their little sisters will never, ever go through what they did, and that's when you hear them start to cry."

Murray and Paneru have been so successful in Dang, they have started to bring their pigs-for-girls program to the neighboring district of Bardiya. Since January, they have liberated 500 girls there, Murray said.

Her foundation is putting 1,500 girls through school at an annual cost of $100 per student. The Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation also runs two boarding schools, one for boys and one for girls who are abandoned or disabled. So far they've been able to send 30 of their boarding school graduates to college.

Murray shows no signs of slowing. She spends six months a year in Nepal and the rest of the year in her Sausalito home. Her coffee table books are unique - binders filled with before-and-after pictures of Nepalese children who were severely malnourished before spending two months in the Nutrition Rehabilitation Home she started for starving hospital patients.

"I saw three sick children die after being sent home from the hospital because they were so hungry, so we created a discharge place where they could go and eat, and the mothers can get education on nutrition and family planning and basic hygiene," Murray said.

For her work, Murray has been honored by the Dalai Lama and the former king of Nepal and was a guest on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

Her life has been one long ride, and it just keeps getting better, she said.

As a child, she liked to linger at New York's Grand Central Station to watch the signs and see where all the trains were going. When she finished high school at 16, after skipping two grades, she hopped on one of those trains and never looked back.

She's crisscrossed the globe, has been married and widowed, and has had some interesting jobs, including opening the fan mail of the famous McCarthy-era muckraker journalist Drew Pearson in the 1950s. But nothing compares to the feeling she has now, when she marches in the streets of Dang with 2,700 freed girls to protest domestic slavery.

"I'm having the best dotage of anybody I know," she said. "Every morning I wake up knowing I'm going to be helping. I feel like I am making a difference."

To get involved
Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation 3030 Bridgeway, Suite 123 Sausalito, CA 94965

-- (415) 331-8585

-- www.nyof.org