Mandira’s translators have nightmares. They turn reports of rape, torture and brutality into English documents that can be shared with the UN, Amnesty International and other organizations. But they aren’t human rights activists — they’re just translators who sometimes get in over their heads in terms of the emotional impact of the work. So, she burns through them.
Mandira Sharma has won international awards for her human rights work and achievements. She’s the founder of Advocacy Forum Nepal and Emily’s former boss and friend. Mandira helps rescue the arbitrarily imprisoned from jails, provide legal defense to the resourceless, and demands accountability for cases of disappeared persons in Nepal. She has expanded from an organization of five at the time Emily left in 2003 to 150 with offices throughout Nepal.
Mandira’s organization does the research and documentation work it takes for other international organizations such as the UN to step in and investigate human rights abuses. Mandira helps identify conscripted child soldiers and get them the help they need.
She also likes Korean food and makes for great dinner conversation.
Over kimchee, Mandira – who got her LLM from a prestigious human rights-centered law program in the UK – explained that Advocacy Forum wins all kinds of legal cases involving human rights and protection of victims, only the government doesn’t heed the orders of the Nepali Supreme Court. The Court makes the right decisions but no one listens – their judgement is hollow.
We learned how the army works to maintain an authority separate from the executive branch of government. Given Nepal’s confused and disorganized leadership and political structure, I wondered if the military might be planning a junta.
“We cannot rule it out. It’s a definite possibility,” Mandira said. She added that it would be highly unpopular at the present time, but that if things turned less stable than they are, you never know.
More importantly, we heard story after story about abduction, rape, murder, disappearances, and cover-ups that were the norm during the last decade in Nepal.
Mandira explained how with the recent peace after years of armed conflict and insurrection, gangs have formed and there are bands of people who extort the middle-class and wealthy with kidnappings. The Nepali business community suffers and life has become unpredictable in a new, yet vaguely familiar way.
Yet, irony and oddity of it all – with all the warring and trouble, all parties leave the foreign tourism community alone. No one wants to disrupt the flow of the cash into Nepal or bring excess international attention – except Mandira who hopes that international forces can play a part in pressuring Nepal into adhering to international human rights doctrines.
Of course, we didn’t just talk about heavy things until we hit clinical depression. Mandira is a fun, brilliant and educated person with a teenage son who is trying to choose a university and husband who loves to cook amazing meals. She can laugh and even make light of some of the everyday and real challenges of Nepal.
I was personally very proud and pleased when Mandira liked my idea about supporting women’s rights in Nepal. On our trek, we saw many women carrying huge and heavy baskets and bundles of wood on their heads and necks. We also saw farmers herding their cows and water buffalo along steep and narrow mountain paths.
Naturally, it occurred to me that perhaps it would be better to use the buffalo to move the cargo than the women. So, I asked our guide, Indra if people ever used the water buffalo for transporting goods.
He said that sometimes up in the mountains people might do that – but never so low (low being about 6,000 feet). That didn’t fully make sense to me – but he indicated that it wouldn’t be very nice for the buffalo to have to carry. I wondered why it was okay for the women….
Mandira said that it’s just the way people think and that in many villages, Nepalis treat their women worse than their animals.
That’s when I pitched it. I realized that with all the sharp hills and narrow mountain passes, llamas would be very useful in Nepal. Perhaps a nonprofit could form to bring in donated llamas and give them to village farming families to use for transporting goods, rather than having girls and women do hard labor?
I would want to call it “Llamas for Lamas” (and of course I’d like to have the spokesperson be Lorenzo Llamas). To my surprise, Mandira liked it and actually saw how if training was included to actually show villagers how to use a pack animal that it could, in fact, significantly impact the lives and roles of Nepali women.
Anyone interested in trying to change the course of women’s rights in Nepal through the strategic use of llamas, please let me know.
Our discussion of llamas and women led us to other areas of rights and cultural difficulties with which I wasn’t familiar. For instance, in villages when girls get their first period, they get locked in a dark room for 13 days and are not allowed to be in the presence of men or boys.
Thereafter, when they have their periods, they must sleep in the barn. Even in more enlightened families where they don’t feel it’s right to send a girl or woman out to a cow pen to sleep, a woman’s husband might kick her out of bed and force her to sleep separately because she’s “dirty” during her cycle.
A woman Mandira knows started an organization to try to educate Nepalis that menstruation isn’t bad or evil and that good hygiene is good while kicking people out to barns and locking them in dark rooms is bad.
Another sad fact – there is a serious problem with women in Nepal developing prolapsed uteruses because of the intense physical labor they do – often within a very short period of giving birth. Because women in villages have little to no access to medical care, the condition goes untreated and often leads to premature death.
“So much to fix….” Mandira said.
But the people of Nepal have something going very right with someone like Mandira fighting for those who can’t fight for themselves.
Happy Birthday, George.
Sent from my iPad
