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| Stuart with a fellow farmer |
In May, Brenda and I joined our daughter, Helen, to visit three villages
around Kathmandu to meet some of the people CWISH had been working with. CWISH is a Nepali charity that is working
with girls and families involved with child domestic labour. The villages were
perched on mountainous slopes, intensively terraced, in the Kavre district just
outside Kathmandu.
We were accompanied
by Sweta a young woman who works for CWISH and we met several groups of people.
Firstly a group of girls and some of their dads. The girls had all been in
child domestic work and CWISH had managed their return home and reintegration
into their families. The fathers said how glad they were to have their girls
back, and how they now realised that sending them off in the first place, had
been wrong, but they just did not realise what they were letting their
daughters into. Then we met a farmer of
a small holding, whose income was so low that CWISH had recognised the high
risk that the family would be sending some of their girls off to work as child
domestics, but that through a little investment by CWISH into the farm, buying
bamboo poles to provide a sheltering structure over some of his terraces, the
farmer could increase his crops and therefore his income, and could keep his
children at home.
It is amazing how just a little investment can make such a
difference to a family, and in particular to a young girl’s life. Then we met a
sort of village council, sitting under a large tree discussing the services
CWISH were offering and hearing their pleas for even more help. We felt a real sense of rural community sitting
beneath that tree, and a deep hope that their appeal for more help can be met,
they start with so little. A fascinating and a humbling day for us Europeans.
Stuart and Brenda Veitch
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| A meeting with village elders in Kavre |
