The Indentured Daughters Program | Freeing Nepali Girls
A Growing Program
That first year, 32 of the 37 families with whom we spoke brought their daughters home and allowed them to enroll in NYF’s program. In its second year, the program rescued additional girls. Now, we have been successful beyond our most optimistic projections. Altogether, more than 12,000 girls have been brought home to live with their families and attend school instead of slaving away in the homes of strangers. Learn how NYF convinced this community to abandon the well-established custom of bonding little girls.
In the areas where we have been working, whereas in prior years thousands of girls were sent off during the Maghe festival, now only a few girls are sold, it is done in secrecy behind closed doors, and the communities consider it shameful. During Maghe one year, a group of our returned girls heard that some girls were on the bus and about to leave for a far-off city to work as servants. They jumped on the bus and found six scared little girls, including one 10 year old and her mother, both weeping at their impending separation. The father had sold the child against the mother’s will. Our girls talked all the children off the bus and enrolled them in NYF’s program.
These two pictures tell the tale: the first is of the tearful child rescued from the bus by our former bonded children, and the second is of the very first girl liberated by NYF in 2000, wearing a traditional dancing costume for a street play against bonding. She is about to finish high school, and an NYF college scholarship awaits her if she passes the entrance examination.