More Than Just a Soccer Tournament for Bhutanese Refugees

The 2nd Annual Bhutanese Interstate Soccer Tournament was hosted at Oakland Technical High School this past weekend, and it was an excellent weekend indeed for the entire Bay Area Bhutanese community. Thirteen Bhutanese teams flew and drove in from Idaho, Colorado, Texas, Oregon, Washington, Tennessee, Arizona and Georgia to compete to win the National Championship.

Soccer in the United States doesn't always get the glory that our beloved football and baseball get, but around the world, soccer ( or as the world calls it, football) is an extremely popular sport that draws billions of impassioned fans, so while we may not think that this soccer tournament would be a big deal, let's take a closer look at why it was.

Although historically a peaceful country, in the '80s and '90s religious infighting in Bhutan caused the government to oust nearly a fifth of the population from their South Asian home, taking away their citizenship and forcing them to go to refugee camps in neighboring Nepal. Slowly, these refugees have been resettled, may of them in pockets of the U.S. In Oakland, you will find scattered neighborhoods of Bhutanese refugees who have been systematically relocated by the UNHCR. Many haven't seen their native Bhutan since the 1990s.

As you can imagine, with the unsettled and dangerous lives many of these refugees have led, a common interest in soccer has helped to give them some joy and passion in their day-to-day lives. They held their first U.S. tournament in Georgia last year. The California team drove across the country tandem in 15 passenger vans, stopping along the way to play music, cook and eat their rice, vegetable curry and lentils. Sounds like Curry Without Worry to me.

After coming in third place last year, the Californian Bhutanese refugee team offered to host the tournament this year. The traveling teams all got to enjoy a taste of the wonderful weather and generous hospitality at the three-day tournament. In many ways the weekend served as a reunion for old friends. There are seven refugee camps in Eastern Nepal. The youth that grew up together in the camps and were neighbors for years did not necessarily relocate to the same areas of the United States. While families often did stay together, friends were dispersed when the relocation to the U.S. took place. In addition, many of the Bay Area's original Bhutanese refugees have left the area because of the high cost of living and high unemployment rate here. So this tournament was not just a soccer game, but a time for old friends who had been through a harrowing experience together to reconnect under joyful circumstances in their new country.

The Bhutanese Community in California organized this year's tournament. A group of about ten community leaders and soccer players started the planning and fundraising several months ago. These are ordinary guys who have made a way for their families and a new life in America through hourly wage jobs at airport shuttle services, laundromats and thrift stores. They were aided by the support of two charitable organizations: Ethne Global Services (Ethne) and Soccer Without Borders.

Ethne was founded in 2010 when a group of people realized that the governmental services offered to the refugee populations in the U.S. tended to be short-lived, lasting only 4-12 months after their arrival. Ethne now offers an ESL class, family mentoring opportunities, and a knitting micro-enterprise for women called Himalayas by Hand. At the soccer tournament, Ethne volunteers helped with food preparation, planning of the event, refereeing, transportation and photography.

Soccer without Borders helped book the soccer field where their own youth teams normally practice. A few men from the Bhutanese community cooked daal, curry and rice outside the playing field in industrial-kitchen-sized pots to feed all thirteen teams lunch on Saturday and Sunday.

How did it go? Well, the championship match for first and second place was between the Dallas, Texas team and the Fort Worth, Texas team. The game ended in a tie and was determined by penalty kicks. Fort Worth, Texas won and took home the trophy. The third place team was from Idaho.

The team from Dallas plans to host the 3rd Annual tournament next year.

More on the story of Bhutanese Refugees.

More about Ethne Global Services.

Get your next gift here & More about the Himalayas by Hand.

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Educating Girls to Stop Girl Trafficking in Nepal

Last week the American Himalayan Foundation (AHF) hosted a beautiful dinner at the Four Seasons in San Francisco to support its "Stop Girl Trafficking" program. The three keynote speakers were Jon Krakauer, mountain climber and bestselling author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air; Siddharth Kara, Harvard Fellow and author of Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery;  and Dr. Aruna Uprenty, AHF's on-the-ground "visionary partner" in Nepal, the founder of this program. They each spoke about the issue of girl trafficking and the best solution to stopping it: the education of Nepalese girls.

The indomitable Dr. Aruna Uprety, champion of AHF's anti-trafficking efforts, with a few of her friends. Permission courtesy of Eileen Moncoeur.

Every year, around 20,000 girls are taken from their homes in Nepal and transported to India and the Middle East to work as slaves. Of these 20,000, it is estimated that 12,000 to 15,000 end up as prostitutes in Indian brothels. If a girl tries to fight, refuse or run, she is burned with cigarettes, beaten, abused and threatened.  Some of these girls are as young as nine years old.

How does this happen?  

Poor, indebted Nepalese parents see their daughters as a liability. If their poverty reaches a point where they can no longer feed their children, it's tragic but common practice to sell a daughter for as little as $200 to a broker who will take her to India, where demand is supposedly high for house servants to wash dishes and clean toilets. For struggling families whose daughters don't have a bright future in Nepal, this can sound like a reasonable choice. Their daughters will end up in households in India, presumably under the safeguard of the families they are sent to work for. But little do the parents know, or want to know, that they are actually giving their daughters away to become enslaved prostitutes. These girls are generally taken to cities far away, like Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore, where they do not speak the language and no one can understand them except for other abducted girls from Nepal. These are young children, with no recourse to defend themselves.

In India, there is a myth that sleeping with a young girl is an antidote for HIV/AIDS.  Because of this, very young Nepali girls are a sought after commodity, and the tragic result is that over 60 percent of the abducted Nepali girls are essentially used as sacrifices and infected with HIV/AIDs.  According to a Human Rights Watch study, in 1995, it was estimated that of the 100,000 sex trade workers living in Mumbai, 50,000 were from Nepal.

While sex trafficking is technically illegal in both Nepal and India, it easily goes undetected and unenforced. The border between these two countries is open and Indians and Nepalis are free to come and go, no questions asked. Most of the girls who leave go willingly, often because they are told they are traveling to jobs in wealthier foreign countries (like Lebanon or the United Arab Emirates) or they are told they are going to meet an Indian husband in an arranged marriage. Some of the girls are drugged and have no idea what is happening, only to wake up on a train or a bus headed for an Indian brothel.  

Indian abductors prey upon families from rural villages who are extremely poor, uneducated and lower caste. In economic desperation, these families willingly sell their daughters. Perhaps most disturbingly, both governments and police are often complicit in the abductions, accepting bribes to look the other way. There are occasional police raids on brothels in India and there are both Indian and Nepali NGO rescue agencies which help return Nepali girls from far-flung Indian cities back to Nepal.  But for many of the kidnapped girls it is too late; they refuse to go home because they know they will be stigmatized and ostracized. Even if a girl is rescued and returns to Nepal, she is generally detained like a criminal until her family picks her up (which they often never do). She is forced to have a medical exam, and if she is HIV positive, she is stigmatized. For the few who make it back to their villages, they are summarily abandoned and shunned by family for bringing shame upon them.

The most effective approach to stopping this sex trade trafficking is to prevent it in the first place, which requires a huge cultural shift, and that starts with education. Like so many third world epidemics, the root causes of sex trafficking are lack of education, poverty and indebtedness. American Himalayan Foundation's Stop Girl Trafficking program is one of the most effective ways to end this horrible practice of flesh trade. The AHF program is built on a very simple premise:  target the most likely areas where traffickers prey, put the girls in school, and educate them and their families about sex trafficking. The traffickers steer clear of villages where they know such programs exist and continue to prey on the more ignorant pockets.

Through AHF and Dr. Uprety's efforts this year, Stop Girl Trafficking has supported 9,500 girls in 400 schools across Nepal, and not one girl has been lost to trafficking. For more information about The Stop Girl Trafficking project and ways you can contribute, visit The American Himalayan Foundation website.  

A Nepali Mother's Day Made Better: The Nepal Youth Foundation Celebrates Its 22nd Year

When Olga Murphy went to Nepal in 1984 she met the children who inspired the founding of her organization,The Nepal Youth Foundation (NYF). As she camped atop a mountain, watching a group of local children struggling to study by lantern on a crude plank table, she realized what she wanted to do with the rest of her life: help Nepali families gain access to better education and resources.

Since that trip, she has returned to Nepal every year except one, and now spends half of each year there. She considers it her second home. And slowly, but with determination and constantly inspired by the Nepalese children who are so eager to learn, she has forged The Nepal Youth Foundation.

Within a few years of her first trip to Nepal, Murphy had gathered about 80 sponsors and formed the official non-profit. At first a simple initiative to better educate Nepalese children, NYF is now a comprehensive and sophisticated foundation offering multiple programs and contributing to the greater society. Major projects include a full scholarship program that takes recipients from kindergarten through medical school, two small children's homes, 14 hospitals for malnourished children, and a flourishing program (The Indentured Daughters Program) to abolish child slavery in Nepal. NYF has also launched two counseling centers -- one for vocational counseling and another for psycho-social counseling.

(Permission to use photo courtesy The Nepal Youth Foundation) 

One of NYF's most successful programs is called Child Mother Pairs. In conjunction with the Nepalese government, they have founded hospitals which act on charity donations to provide a full month of care and training to a mother and her child for only $250. This program brings malnourished and sick children back to health, trains their mothers in their future care, and then trains mothers to train other mothers to do the same. It's a genuine community education endeavor which extends beyond the hospital walls and is making an impact on the health of families throughout the communities by promoting childcare and nutrition education on a grassroots level. Of this pioneering program, Olga Murphy says: "They get everything they need. Medical care, counseling, healthy food and water, large beds so they can stay with their children -- all for $250 a month. We have also just built a center just outside Kathmandu, where we are building a library, hiring dietitians to educate the Nepali mothers, and starting village outreach programs."

Much of what NYF does is raise awareness within the Nepalese community, teaching proper childcare and nutrition. But through their Indentured Daughters Program, they have also saved over 12,000 girls from forced labor. It has been common practice in Nepal for children to be bonded away as labor by their parents for as little as $50 a year. But the Indentured Daughters Program is saving lives by changing minds. "We were able to change the mentality of the people," says Murphy. "We are turning the community against the custom, so that this will be the last generation of girls that will be sold. It is no longer okay to send your daughter away; it is now looked at by the community as shameful." The program -- which has included a massive nationwide awareness effort including street campaigns and lawsuits -- has been very successful at freeing girls from bondage as well as irradiating the custom at its root level.

NYF is a four-star Charity Navigator charity, and is able to send 81 percent of the money they raise to directly benefit needy children in Nepal. Only 19 percent is spent on fundraising, and with a $2 million budget in 2011, this is no small achievement. NYF stands as one of, if not the best charity available to donors wishing to help the children of Nepal.

As I write this, on the eve of Mother's Day 2012, I can't think of a better gift to support the beauty and sanctity of motherhood and make a real difference to a mother and her child. I applaud the work and life of Olga Murphy, and hope one day to have even a sliver of the success she has had in making a difference to the people of Nepal and beyond. She turns 87 on May 30, and when I asked her if she would have done anything differently, she said, "I just wish I started sooner."

This Mother's Day, or any day for that matter, perhaps this is the perfect gift.