Room to Read works across south-east Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, targeting countries where the charity feels it can help. That means places with relatively stable infrastructure and no bloody civil wars, but their own unique challenges.
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In Nepal – as in Uganda, which I visited in 2016 with another charity, Promoting Equality in African Schools (Peas) – female literacy is a particular problem. Since girls aren’t valued as highly as boys, they get worse schooling. That in turn increases their chances of being married off and taken out of education altogether. Across the world, girls who complete school have higher lifetime earnings, fewer children and a better chance of giving their own daughters a good start in life. Things are improving – in 2013, half of women in Nepal were illiterate – but inequality remains. According to Unicef’s 2015 figures, 89.2 per cent of males aged 15-24 are now literate, but only 77.5 per cent of females.
The young women I spoke to reported that their brothers were given the best toys and larger portions of food. If a family has enough money to send only one child to a private school, that child will almost always be a son. (Government schools suffer from poor funding and a lack of teachers.) Girls are kept home from school to do chores, not provided with the exercise books and materials they need, and often they are married young, leading to high dropout rates. A young wife of just eight or nine is vulnerable to the same pressures as a kamlari.
“In a household where there is a male and a female child, the girl is given a lot of housework while the boy is allowed to go out and play,” Dil Kumari Chaudhary, a social mobiliser, told me. “My parents didn’t send me to school, but to work in another person’s house. I was seven.”
Chaudhary slept on an old torn sheet below the stairs, getting up at 4am to wash, cook and clean. Her duties also included giving the “landlord” and his wife massages. (Anti-kamlari activists convinced the landlord to let her go home when she was 13.) It is easy to see how the kamlari system can lead to neglect and abuse. Girls who live, in effect, as slaves – or, at best, hostages for their parents’ debts – are vulnerable and unprotected. Another social organiser, Anisha Tharu (the surname is common in the community) told me that she had been sexually harassed by her landlord and his sons, and ran away. She didn’t see the point in being angry about the past – “what has happened, has happened” – but she was determined to help other girls.
Room to Read’s programmes watch out for girls who are at risk, visiting their families if they skip school for three days, fail exams or do not turn up for life skills sessions. I watched Chaudhary lead one of these classes, teaching girls about sanitary towels and what they can expect when they get their periods.
When I left her family’s house, Sangita told me that she felt optimistic, and perhaps she was right. If the promise of politics is that each generation should live better than the previous one, then a glance at her mother showed how far Sangita had come. A short, sun-toughened woman, Basmoti Tharu was 43 or 44 – she couldn’t be sure – and had been married at eight or nine, before her first period arrived.
What would you want my readers to know, I asked her? The chain of translations began, and eventually Basmoti’s answer came back: “They should send their daughters to school, and not let them get married too young.”
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