The following morning I had a meeting with Shyam Pokhara, founder of SASANE an organization that helps survivors of Human Trafficking by giving them paralegal training.
In Nepal if you are a victim of human trafficking your family won't always accept you back into their home and no one will likely want to marry you so most women end up beggars on the street or have to continue prostituting themselves to survive. As paralegals, not only can they support themselves but they work with the police stations to help other victims since the police won't write up a report for a family of a trafficked relative without charging a fee. And since most victims come from poor rural farming communities, they cannot pay.
To translate Shyam brought Surendra Bdr. Nepali, from the National news Agency. Surendra wears thick coke bottle glasses and laughs all the time. No matter what I said,
he laughed. He also shook his head “no” a lot. Especially when he was saying yes. In fact the stronger his yes, the more his head said “no.” So we shared Nepali tea and talked about the very serious issue of human trafficking and chuckled our way through the meeting. We arranged to meet at the SASANE offices tomorrow where I will be able to interview some of the remarkable women involved in the organization