Chapter 4
Lifting the Veil for Women Who Don't Exist—Nepal
My husband was a doctor and he died in the Gulf War. That period after he died was a very unhappy one for me. I was so up and down, not knowing what I'm going to do, and I wasn't even normal at that time.
—Lily Thapa
OVERNIGHT, LILY THAPA BECAME WHAT ALMOST ALL MARRIED women fear most in Nepal—she became a widow. Even though Lily came from an upper-class family and was herself an educated and accomplished woman who ran a primary school in Kathmandu, she instantly went from high status to almost no status, as dictated by traditional Nepalese society. It is quite difficult for anyone outside a conservative and traditionally patriarchal society to comprehend that in it a woman's place in the world and society is totally wrapped up in her decision to marry and dependent on her husband's position. And once more, her status is further delineated when her husband dies. Only in the past few years, as stories of the plight of women from the Arab world have become more widely disseminated, have people of other cultures caught a glimpse of the tragedy of being a woman in a religiously conservative male-dominated society.
Lily was far more fortunate than most. Her family was more modern, her parents and siblings supportive. But her in-laws, the Nepalese law, and the society she lived in were anything but supportive. Most women have no choice but to assume the role decided for them by hundreds of years of culture and religion that maintain that if a husband dies before his wife, his wife must have bewitched him and therefore deserves to die herself. Her life without her husband is not supposed to be worth living. Under these strictures, mostly imposed by religious leaders and practiced throughout the ages, widows are not allowed to wear red, or anything colorful. They may not wear bangles, nose-rings, or any jewelry (they should not look or feel attractive). They are no longer allowed to eat meat (meat is equated to increasing sexuality). They are not allowed to live with or even near their parents (unless they were thrown out of their in-laws' home), and they are required to move in with their husband's family because all joint property previously acquired with their husband now belongs to the husband's family. In many families, especially lower-class ones, a brother-in-law has the right to exert economic, social, and even sexual rights over a widow.
It was uncomfortable for me to listen to Lily's story. No wonder she was lost and feeling “not herself”! Everything around her wanted her not to be normal, not to be herself, for in her culture only if she married again would she and her children have any rights or social or legal status. Until then, they would literally have nothing to call their own.
Lily kept on running the primary school that she started with her husband, and one day a Jesuit priest at her children's boarding school asked if she would visit another newly widowed woman who was not as fortunate as Lily and was suffering badly with her in-laws. So forty-five days after she herself was widowed, Lily went to the home of the mother-in-law of another widow whom she did not know.
When I heard Laxmi's story, it was terrible, because she was very young and had a young child. The first time we spoke she did not tell me anything. She just cried and ran. But the next meeting she told me something that always struck me. Her brother-in-law would beat up her two-year-old son if she didn't agree to share her bed with him. He left her with no choice. I was so surprised to hear these things, and I had never imagined that this could be happening to a woman here in Kathmandu. Then I came back and I couldn't stop thinking about her story. I spoke to my other friends and my family and asked how we could help her.
Lily managed to get permission from the mother-in-law to let Laxmi go to school during the day and paid for Laxmi to go to tailoring school. When Laxmi graduated, Lily bought her a sewing machine. As soon as Laxmi started to earn money and bring it home, her status with her in-laws changed. She got more respect and now her mother-in-law was the one who protected Laxmi's son while Laxmi went to work. Lily got such joy from watching Laxmi flourish that it made her feel fulfilled like never before. From then on, Lily knew what she wanted and needed to do.
Over the next year, widows started to gather at Lily's school on Sundays to share their sorrowful stories and get moral support from one another. Through word of mouth, the gatherings became so large that Lily had to rent a small space close by so widows could have a place to meet during the week. The meetings eventually became daily events. Lily called the space “Bedana bisune thalo,” the Nepalese term for “a platform for sharing.” Lily and the widows added their own twist to it and called it “a platform for sharing sorrows.”
Rita Thapa (no relationship to Lily), who later also became an Ashoka Fellow, was at that time an experienced program manager for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and a board member of the Global Fund for Women. She heard about a woman in the capital who was running a platform for widows, and—being a widow herself—she was intrigued. So she stopped by to meet Lily. After hearing about the informal meetings and all the problems the women presented, she suggested that Lily start an NGO so she could officially solicit money to expand the work. Rita helped Lily register as a legal NGO called Women for Human Rights (WHR) and then helped her get her first grant from the Global Fund for Women. Rita also supplied inspiration and encouragement to guide Lily through the process of building the infrastructure and growth capacity around Bedana bisune thalo so it could metamorphose into WHR.
A year later, Rita was so inspired by attending the International Conference on Women in Beijing that when she returned, she quit her job at UNDP and started her own NGO called TEWA. TEWA's mission was to help Nepalese women develop sustainable local enterprises to help them earn enough to make them self-reliant, thereby elevating their status and alleviating many of the restrictions patriarchal society places on them. Its objective was to work with rural women to support their work, their political voice, and their visibility. And of course, Rita asked Lily to volunteer at TEWA so she could help mentor her on a daily basis to better prepare her to grow WHR.
I learned many things from Rita. How to institute programs, how to solicit grants and donations and increase funding, what all the structures of government were—everything I learned at TEWA. I started to apply what I was learning to WHR.
At that time Lily was providing only a meeting place for widows, she wasn't actually offering any programs. After two years with Rita, Lily started restructuring her board and developing her mission and focus. Eventually Lily became the board treasurer of TEWA, and during her six years as a volunteer, she met Sadhana Shrestha, another volunteer, who (like Rita and Lily) was also a widow. Sadhana's brother worked in Sweden; upon hearing his sister's description of Lily's work with widows, he nominated Lily to go to Sweden and participate in a women's studies course. The one-month course was the final step in Lily's education. She learned how to write a five-year plan, how to raise women's voices, and how to organize groups, along with more sophisticated ways to run an NGO. She came back, left TEWA, and sold her school so she could devote full attention to making WHR what it is today.
In 1999, with help from Rita and many NGO groups around Nepal, WHR organized the first-ever widows' gathering in Kathmandu. It was the talk of the media as well as Nepal. Never had such a gathering of women come from all over the country as a group. And the learnings were immense. The workshop focused on two important issues: the color red and the word widow. Lily was well aware that the two things worked together.
Everybody asks me why I am focusing on the colors, because it is not only the matter of the color. But color gives you a lot of confidence. It's empowering. As soon as your husband dies, your choice of what you wear is taken away from you. So if you are free to wear anything, free to do anything, then you get your confidence back. Color is huge because it's so visible.
But for Nepalese widows, wearing red was totally against their religious culture. So Lily reviewed all the holy books and was careful to note that nowhere were all the restrictions placed on widows written in the ancient holy books. She realized that it's all been misinterpreted, a misrepresentation regarding women and the holy books that keeps on repeating itself the world over. The widows' gathering also determined never to use the word widow again, as it was permeated with a sense of humiliation. They replaced it with the term single woman, which gave the women the ability to identify themselves as such when asked if they were married. They did not have to lie, but neither did they have to be harassed or shunned as they would be if they said they were widows.
Nepal is divided into seventy-five districts and 3,915 villages. Most are located in mountainous terrain, and if you have ever hiked the Himalayas, you have seen the precarious types of places where many of the villages are located. From its initial village-to-village, all-over-the-mountains campaign to the present, WHR has organized groups in 425 villages located in sixty-eight districts with a total paid membership of more than sixty thousand women—most under age fifty. WHR now makes catalyst grants to rural village women who are changing their communities in order to support, empower, and encourage other women to be leaders for change. They become the village changemakers, the women who change other's lives—much like Rita, Lily, and Sadhana did for each other.
Ram Devi is one of these women. She comes from a very backward, remote village. She was totally illiterate when Lily met her, and she had been thrown out of her in-laws' house with her children. WHR brought her to Kathmandu for multiple training sessions, and when she went back to the village, she opened up a tailoring shop and started to form women's groups that now number forty and have two thousand members. That was around the turn of the century, and now Ram Devi is so empowered that she is WHR's district chair. She recently petitioned and was given a land grant from the village government to build a center for women amid the orange and coffee farms that the single women have started. The profits from the farms are divided among the women and the WHR district office, which creates a sustainable cycle to perpetuate both WHR and the local women. The money is then used in a credit program to make loans to the women to build small houses.
Ram Devi has become a local celebrity. She has been asked by the local government to be on the Peace Committee, which is now one of the most powerful village committees in Nepal. Ram Devi, her village, its culture, and the lives of the widows have been changed forever. Her story represents the changes that WHR is effecting all over the country.
In 2005, Lily formed the first international conference on widows' rights in Nepal. Representatives from eleven countries attended and declared a Widows' Charter. The charter has passed to the Nepalese government and to the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. They adopted Article 9 and pledged that all the South Asian countries they represented would look after their widows. They are now all working on providing social security for widows.
WHR's network has now spread to all countries in South Asia with the exception of the Maldives and Bhutan, which have matriarchal societies. As Lily says with a wry smile, “Those two countries don't have a widow problem, they have a widower problem.” WHR has also spread to Afghanistan to support the growing number of conflict widows and to Pakistan to support the vast numbers of widows and half-widows who are refugees. (Pakistani widows are often referred to as half-widows because they don't know if their husbands are dead or alive or where they are.) In 2010 representatives of sixteen countries attended Lily's international meeting. In 2011, in deference to the growing number of AIDS widows and those in the current fifty-four countries in conflict around the world, she appeared at the United Nations raising the issue of specifically mentioning widows in all human rights issues. Interestingly enough, there are no examples of any human rights declarations that specifically include widows.
Lily is proud of the discriminatory policy changes WHR has been able to effect. As a result of her work, the Nepalese law has now changed and widows of every age receive monthly allowances from the government every year as their social security. Lily credits Rita and TEWA with giving her the ability to free herself from the societal tentacles holding her back and the opportunity to scour the country to find changemakers. These experiences made her feel like she was a changemaker catalyst and a big part of helping Nepal rebuild after the Maoist insurgency. “Rita made me jump into that sea,” she says, “and I just started swimming.” And whatever happened to Sadhana, who was also being trained as a changemaker alongside Lily at TEWA? Nominated by Rita, Sadhana became Nepal's first director of Ashoka and went on to help create a culture of social entrepreneurship in Nepal that thrives to this day.
Lily, Rita, and Sadhana are extreme examples of how social entrepreneurs sow seeds of inspiration, mentorship, and role modeling; mix them with liberal amounts of innovation, support, and determination; and scatter the landscape with changemakers who for years to come will grow and sustain what they have begun.