There is a growing realization that if we are ever to have positive change and economic betterment for Nepal’s villagers, we, the ordinary people—and above all the young people of Nepal—must bring it. And we need to start it now, before Nepal joins the list of “failed states”.
The cream of our youth is leaving the country in droves. For lack of employment opportunities at home they are allowing themselves to be exploited by unscrupulous manpower agencies in Kathmandu and unscrupulous land speculators in the countryside. We all know the risks inherent for our desperate-for-earnings youth. We read news of labour-related tragedies in the Gulf or Malaysia every day: No compensation for workplace accidents, confiscation of passports, failure to pay promised wages, women enduring rape and virtual slavery in uncountable households, the list goes on.
Mental illness and the number of suicides among our once eager and hopeful young population is rising. These acts of desperation, often motivated by poverty, reflect the bleak future many face here and the unbearable circumstances in which they have had to work abroad.
This exodus has had a devastating effect on our villages, now comprised mainly of the very old and the very young, both unfit to produce the crops needed to feed Nepal. Villagers are already wondering who will plant the rice after the monsoon. Their hopes enhanced by the presence of NGOs, some are even looking for foreign volunteers to work the fields.
All over Nepal, foreign-funded NGOs are supposedly (and sometimes genuinely) helping the country. The new trend is to bring in foreign volunteers willing to pay to “help” in already relatively prosperous areas. This further marginalises the poorest and most remote villages while leaving the poor, unemployed youth to stand in longer and longer queues outside the Foreign Ministry.
As I passed these long lines of mostly very young men and women over the past few months, I asked myself: Why can’t the desire of these youths to better themselves and feed their families be harnessed to help their own countrymen? Why can’t their talents and hard work be utilised and rewarded here at home instead?
Carefully prepared questionnaires handed to a sampling of young people waiting outside the Foreign Ministry showed that if offered a similar salary as that saved while working abroad to work in poor villages in Nepal,100 percent would do it. That was enough motivation for me and similarly minded young friends to swing into action.
Today, every aware Nepali agrees on the crying need for an ethical revolution in Nepal: a naitik kranti! The inevitable next comment is: But who is going to lead it? My answer is something like this: “You, and thousands of idealistic, patriotic youth like you! If you wait for a dedicated moral leader to emerge from the morass of misguided politicians, whose politics are presently destroying what is left of our moral fibre, it will be too late to save Nepal!”
Investigation into corruption in various government departments and security agencies has begun. Even the political youth have begun to speak out against the selfishness of their leaders; youth in all walks of life should be encouraged to do the same. If they can unite to fight corruption, with loud and clear moral outrage, Nepal’s youth will become an unstoppable positive force.
All the above factored into the decision to form an organisation, Youth Volunteers, Nepal, to encourage Nepal’s youth to work in their own country instead of seeking jobs abroad. Having followed Nepal’s ‘development’ over the last 50 years, I perhaps had both “gaum pharkaun” and the NDS, (National Development Service) in the back of my mind when I woke up one morning and decided not to cry, but to do! With rising awareness among all segments of society, this is the ideal time to launch such a nation-wide campaign. The express purpose is to lessen the pernicious and widening gap between rich and poor, developed and undeveloped, and educated and uneducated. Regarding education, a visionary leader could have learned from Fidel Castro, and after our recent revolution, urged educated citizens to return to their villages and stay until everyone could read and write. This is how Cuba’s 100 percent literacy rate was achieved within a year of the revolution!
We have had no such visionary leader, but we can try to transform the country into one of which we can take pride! Our youth volunteers will represent a start of what we hope will become a nation-wide development effort. Our volunteers will be asked to teach the illiterate—of whatever age—to read and write, to help villagers identify and improve income producing activities (like beekeeping and mushroom farming) and especially to help develop and market the agriculture and unique bio-diversity with which we have been blessed.
Youth Volunteers will be chosen on the basis of their love of Nepal and desire to work to improve it. They must be flexible, able to live in harmony with the poorest villagers and have no class, caste, or ethnic prejudices. Special qualifications like expertise in local crafts, organic farming, village tourism, or medicinal herbs will be most welcome. Volunteers will receive subsistence funds for food and incidental expenses during their year of service. A sum similar to the amount earned if working in the Middle East will be put in a bank account, to be drawn out after completion of the year.
Everyone asks how we will fund such a potentially huge programme. Our idea is that every Nepali citizen with the means to do so, should participate in empowering our youth to build a ‘new’ (in the true sense of the word) Nepal. Initially, Youth Volunteers, Nepal will ask every Nepali businessman—and individuals of any other nationality who love Nepal and can afford to help its youth—to donate a minimum of US $2500 (Rs. 177,500) to support a volunteer for one year. We are starting small with a few nearby villages and plan to expand to the Mid and Far West within six months.
Nepal, as I keep telling those whose “Nepal katam” refrain is growing in cadence, is not a “poor country”. It is one of the richest countries in the world in culture, water resources, biodiversity, natural beauty, and above all, its honest, hard-working people. It is only the poverty of the quality of our leadership that makes us seem poor. By employing our youth in their own country, uplifting the lives of their poorer compatriots and developing needy villages, Nepal can one day become the land of equality and economic progress of which we all dream. To Nepalis everywhere: please love your country. Be proud of your country. And above all, help and take pride in its youth. The future of Nepal depends on them.
Adams is an American-born Nepali citizen who established Youth Volunteers, Nepal on the anniversary of her 50th year in Nepal
