Child trafficking, street children and corrupt orphanage owners of Nepal

“Developing countries have been hit hard by the financial crisis in the West, as funding rapidly dwindles for organizations such as The Umbrella Foundation, one of the most established sources of support for the lost children of Nepal. Child trafficking, street children and corrupt orphanage owners are just some of the issues dealt with by the organization, whose primary mission, in accordance with research by United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), is to reunify children with their families.

The founding of The Umbrella Foundation

It took great sympathy and little observation for Irish born Viva Bell, Dave Cutler and Harry Coogan to perceive that somebody needed to take action against corrupt orphanage owners in Nepal’s capital of Kathmandu. Upon meeting a street child suffering from a throat infection, Bell took the child to the hospital, waiting as they nursed him back to health, and then to an orphanage where she visited him a few times. After interacting with the other children there, Bell realized that the owner of the orphanage was pocketing most of the donations for himself. Cutler and Coogan came to her aid as they established a financial base in Ireland. The trio, with the help of public authorities, closed the orphanage and took the children into their own care. In 2005, The Umbrella Foundation was born, to shelter the vulnerable ‘orphans’ of Nepal. It was only later, through talking to the children, that Bell came to understand that most of the children had living relatives and the reality of their backgrounds came to be acknowledged.

A troubling past for Umbrella’s children

The children at Umbrella have unique stories. However, a majority of them were trafficked to Kathmandu from rural parts of Nepal, where the pressure on parents to work away from home is pervasive and people leap at the chance to relinquish the cost of caring for their children. Trafficking cases in Nepal shot up in the late 1990s. It was then that the civil war began and Maoist rebels started recruiting child soldiers. Parents began paying traffickers to bring their children to Kathmandu with the mindset that no matter what happened in the capital, it would be better for them than fighting for the Maoists.

Many people latched onto the money-making opportunity that rural families presented and thus, trafficking spread throughout Nepal, reinforced by the prospect of further funding provided to ‘orphanages’ in Kathmandu by inattentive tourists. Gopal Ghimire, the Child Protection and Development Manager at Umbrella explains how trafficking functions in Nepal, “The parents pay the trafficker. When we meet the parents and ask them ‘Did you pay money?’ Some of the parents openly say, ‘Yes we payed Rs [Rupees] 30,000, Rs 40,000 per child.’ The trafficker says ‘Your children will get a good education in Kathmandu…they will get good food and you don’t need to worry about their future because the donor or the sponsor will look after their children for them. Even if you pay just Rs 40,000 right now then your children’s future will be bright. If you are not prepared to send your child away then I can go to somebody else and they will.’ So the parents accept, the trafficker gets money from the parents and brings the children to abusive homes in Kathmandu.”

Trafficking is an ongoing problem in Nepal, involving the buying and selling of around 1.6 million children between the ages of 5 and 17, according to the 2011 National Child Labour Report.

In the capital, children endure poor conditions at illegal children’s homes. As Ghimire explains, home managers tell tourists that the children are orphans, presenting false certification of the children’s parents deaths in order to convince them to provide sponsorships and donations, nearly all of which go towards the well-being of the manager. In one home, the manager would spend most of the funding on alcohol and his personal benefit. He would fight with the other staff over finances, and when any of the children did anything to displease him, they were made to stand in a line while he used a plastic water pipe to beat them one by one. In another home, the children were severely malnourished, fed only broth made mostly with water. These children were sent to the streets to beg for food and when they refused to do so, they were beaten.

The perpetuation of illegal orphanages depends upon the donations given by foreigners. ‘Orphaned’ children can be sold for around $25,000 to families abroad. Putting responsibility upon visiting tourists to enquire about the homes they intend to fund. Ghimire says,“My request to sponsors is to dig deep and investigate where their money is going.” Ghimire asserts, organizations who investigate the credibility of children’s homes include the District Child Welfare Board (DCWB), the Central Child Welfare Board (CCWB), and the Social Welfare Council (SWC).

Such backgrounds have caused serious impediments to the children’s development. Four of Umbrella’s children lived on the streets. Two worked collecting rags and plastic while the other pair begged for food, consumed alcohol and sniffed glue. They turned to the streets after their mother died and their father resorted to alcoholism. They were taken in by Umbrella, where they are now encouraged to cultivate their natural aptitude for singing and playing the guitar. However, partially excluded by the other children due to the stigma of their previous lifestyle and their drug habits, the ramifications of their background have far from dissipated. Another child has developed a severe speech impediment as Ghimire explains, for the children in general, the fear of the consequences of their actions has been beaten into them.

Family separation and reunification

One of The Umbrella Foundation’s key ventures is the reintegration of children separated from their families. Around seven years ago, the foundation came to acknowledge that the children they had taken in were not always orphaned, but had parents living elsewhere in Nepal. To this end, reunifying the children with long missed relatives became Umbrella’s main priority.

One of the most recent reintegration cases is of a boy, separated from his parents at the age of five. His parents divorced and he stayed with his father who remarried. As Ghimire recounts, “The stepmother was so abusive. She beat him all the time when he was young. The father loved him, but he had to go to work each day. When he discovered how abusive the stepmother was, he passed the child to another woman to care for him and she promised she would send him to school and give him food and shelter in her home.” Instead, the woman sent the boy to work in a tea shop where he was kept as a servant to clean dishes and clothes. If the boy misbehaved, he was scolded. Later, he was enrolled in a Hindu school. The administration at the school did not understand the child’s background or his behavior. Deciding that they couldn’t keep him, a government agency was contacted and he was taken to Umbrella.

Ghimire and the boy had countless meetings in which he asked the boy about every detail he could recall about the people and the buildings from his village. From the boy’s description, Ghimire was able to trace the boy’s family to a community in the Eastern part of Nepal. Throughout these sessions, the boy repeatedly said, “My father loves me very much.” This prompted Ghimire to find the boy’s father at all costs.

Ghimire describes the moment when the father and the boy were reunited: “In the beginning the child was so nervous he didn’t even dare look straight at his father. The father pounced on his son like a cat who had just caught a mouse. Neither father nor child could manage their emotions. We explained to the boy how the father had left him but the boy didn’t know how to react, whether to hug or shake his hand…But when he saw his father cry he cried too.”

Besides child trafficking, another reason for the children’s separation from their families was due to errors on the part of The Umbrella Foundation, which previous Country Director, Stephen Jenkinson says was because, “They [earlier project managers] had good intentions and big hearts but, in being blinded by compassion, were perhaps short-sighted with regards to the reality of the long-term implications of decisions.” A plan to take around 60 children from the Northern Rosuwa district, to Kathmandu, was made when the original country director, Jacky Buk met an organizer from a French organization, Sol Himal, and heard about the work they were doing with disadvantaged young people from Tibet, Nepal and India. Buk leapt upon the prospect of a merger between Umbrella and Sol Himal since, as Jenkinson explains, “[Sol Himal] had reserves in the bank for a rainy day, which Umbrella has never had to this day, so Jacky was thinking of the 250 children already in our care.”

Sol Himal wanted to close one of their less successful homes and move the 50 or so children to The Umbrella Foundation for better care. When such changes did not materialize, Umbrella had two empty homes fully prepared with the capacity to house around 60 children, but no children to fill them. It was then that they had the idea to do a survey of the Rosuwa district, enquiring with the development committee of every village who were the neediest children in the area. Those selected included orphans and children living in poor conditions or with seriously dysfunctional relatives. They were then taken to the homes in Kathmandu to have better care and a quality education.

However well-intentioned the move from Rosuwa was, it transpired to be an ignorant act. As the U.N. Convention of the Rights of the Child states, “For the full and harmonious development of a child’s personality, he or she should grow up in a family environment.” The missions of The Umbrella Foundation have developed in accordance with the research conducted by organizations such as UNICEF. As Jenkinson explains, “Over the last seven years or so, Umbrella has evolved as an organization organically, it has different personnel and perspectives have changed. At the beginning, the aim was to give [the children] as good an education as possible and if the family situation was good, to get them back, but if there was any issue with the family situation, to keep them [in Kathmandu].”

Tsewang Norbu Lama, who is the Chief Reintegration Officer at The Umbrella Foundation, works to find and reunite parents with their children. He explains, “If a child has a good, strong relation with the family, then they can be a good, sociable, responsible person.” Jenkinson elaborates with a story about one of the oldest boys at Umbrella, currently pursuing his Bachelors degree at a university in Kathmandu. “He still said that he would have preferred when he was 12 years old to not to have left his village because he finds his relationship with his parents really difficult now.” Jenkinson emphasizes the importance of family relationships before adding, “I’d rather the kids be happy farmers than miserable doctors.”

So far Umbrella has reintegrated around 200 children with families whose villages span from the far west to the far east of Nepal. However, it is not a smooth process. Norbu Lama, the Chief Reintegration Officer, goes to extreme lengths, trekking to mountain villages in search of the children’s relatives. Even when local officials provide information on where parents live, it is a slow process of negotiation in order to convince relatives to take their children back.

As Lama explains, “A lot of older children call their parents or relatives to warn them that Umbrella is coming and when we arrive in their village we find that the parents are hiding. In some cases, we had no information about a child, just a photo and the name of the district that they come from. We would take the photo and walk for days and days through villages asking ’do you know this child?” Lama adds that it is also financially secure families who send their children to the capital and that “These families don’t want their children back.” Following threats and bribes by the parents, insisting that Umbrella keep their children in Kathmandu, discussions eventually lead to family reunions.

Awareness of the consequences of child trafficking is slowly being raised as Umbrella works with local schools to send the message across that Kathmandu and the poor conditions of the other children’s homes they arrive at, are the worst situation for the children to end up in.

Dwindling support threatens welfare of Nepal’s most vulnerable

The monthly income of The Umbrella Foundation is around 26,000 Euros while their expenditures reach close to 32,000 Euros. A majority of this goes towards food and living expenses of the children in the homes. Twenty-two percent of the budget is used to support reintegrated children, including providing them an education, food and medication. Only 7 percent of their income goes towards the wages of overheads. This compares against other charities, such as Kid’s Wish Network, Cancer Fund of America and Children’s Wish Foundation International, to name but a few for which less than 10 percent of their income goes towards direct cash aid.

Umbrella’s mission has been developing over the past 8 years to perfect the practices it employs today. The projects they are engaged with, in particular family reunification and reintegration, are ones that put the interests of the children first. However, with dwindling funding due to the financial crisis in the West, the predicament of safe havens for the most vulnerable populations of Nepal is brought into question.”

The trafficked, abandoned and displaced children of Nepal

[The International 9/10/13 by Holly Brentnall]

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