Hello All,
In February last year, I was in Kathmandu. It was three days before the end of my trip. I had already been to Kaule and met with the villagers and evaluated the then current status of the Kaule Goat Project. I was back in the big city exploring, shopping, and packing.
One afternoon I decided to take a walk from my hotel into one of the central shopping districts of the city called Bouddha. In the Bouddha District is one of the largest Stupas on earth. A Stupa is a Buddhist monument (for lack of a better word) around the perimeter of which are mounted prayer wheels. Faithful Buddhists walk around the Stupa activating the prayer wheels and praying. Not really sure who they are praying to since they do not have a god in the way that Christians, Muslims or Jews do, or even gods in the ways Hindus do, although I do not pretend to know everything or even much about Buddhism.
Anyway, on this particular day as I neared the Stupa, I noticed a woman sitting on the roadside with a handful of water bottles and holding a very small child. Both the woman and the child were dirty and had no shoes. I was thirsty and assuming the water bottles were for sale, I asked the woman if she would sell me a bottle of water which she did. I asked Rina if I could hold the baby, Manat, and take a picture with her. I guess that did the trick, because the next thing I knew Rina was inviting me to her small village for chapati (a type of Indian and Nepali bread) and tea. At first I was a little nervous, because I had no idea where she was taking me. I had actually started to decline the invitation, when God nudged me and I said yes.
Rina lives in a slum in Kathmandu informally known as the Indian Village. It is called that because it is occupied by thousands of illegal Indian migrants who escaped India seeking a better life in Nepal. Ironically, there are also thousands of illegal Nepalis who have fled to India seeking a better life than they had at home in Nepal. Sadly, it seems many of these refugees now recognize that the grass was not to be greener on the other side.
Rina and her child when I met her in February 2024.
Me, Rina, and Baby Manat.
Rina introduced me to some of her friends, including Bimla (the seeming leader of their “ward” of the Indian Village) and Arti. Rina and Bimla are both in their mid-thirties with children. Arti is now nineteen and engaged to be married by an arranged marriage. Although Rina and Bimla speak English, Nepali, Hindi, and Punjabi, they are illiterate, as are most adult Indians living in Nepal. Arti has attended school since coming to Nepal with her parents and can read and write English, Nepali, and Hindi.
In Nepal, illegal Indians have no civil rights and generally are not welcome. They are considered a drain on social services and providing for their needs is considered an insult to Nepali taxpayers. So, I asked Bimla and Rina why in the world they came from India to Nepal in the first place. In India, they are part of the Dalit (untouchable) caste, meaning that they are the lowest of the low with no prospects of upward mobility. In India, the Dalit are confined to the most degrading forms of work, or to begging. They cannot “marry up,” they do not have access to higher education, and they are considered ceremonially unclean. (Imagine Old Testament lepers.) Although Nepal also has the traditional Hindu caste system, the Indians had heard that it was not as rigorously observed as in India. While that may well be true, what they did not figure on is the stringent way illegal immigrants are treated under Nepali law. As a result, in Nepal, they remain beggars and (illegal) sellers of trinkets on the street. For many Indian refugees in Nepal, their station in life is actually worse than if they had stayed in India in the first place.
When I first went to the Indian Village with Rina for chapati and tea, most of the people there approached me like an ATM. “Give me money.” “Buy me food.” “My children are hungry.” Bimla and Rina were not like that. They did not beg from me. They talked to me about their lives in Nepal and how it compared to their former lives in India. I had so many questions and they had answers. I asked why they didn’t go back to India and they told me they didn’t have the money to do that and anyway, they didn’t want to go back to being treated like human garbage. (They were conflicted on this.) I asked them why they didn’t get deported. They told me that as long as they didn’t get in big trouble, the Nepal authorities would not spend the resources to deport Indian refugees, especially since they were Hindus.
I was in the Indian village with Rina and Bimla and some of their friends and family for several hours eating and drinking that first day. At the end, I asked them what I could do to help them. This is where I knew I wanted to work with them. They told me that the people in the village were cold. Only a few had blankets. Kathmandu is cold in the winter, 30s and 40s at night and the Indian Village is composed of only makeshift tents open to the elements. Instead of asking for things just for themselves, Bimla and Rina asked for things to help their community. And blankets were a very practical thing. They wanted one large blanket per family, not one blanket per person. The next day I bought them 75 heavy duty, extra large blankets for the 75 families living in their small section of the Indian Village. I also bought them rice, beans and milk which they promptly used to feed the children in that section of the village. They could have hoarded the food for themselves, but they didn’t.
People in the Indian village during my visit last year.
Children eating in Indian village.
Since then, I have been talking to them via text trying to come up with a project we could do together that would build on the idea of them helping their community while also helping them develop as individuals. Admittedly, this has not been easy. At their core, Bimla and Rina have beggars’ mentalities. Their ideas primarily involved GCA giving them charitable gifts, albeit not gifts to them personally, but gifts to the community. I have tried to explain that I would prefer to do a project where the community would benefit, but they would work to make it successful and would themselves profit in order to advance (develop) personally.
I met with the ladies for three days while I was in Kathmandu last week brainstorming possible projects. After going back and forth with many ideas, I believe we have settled on one that will work. The idea hearkens back to Frances’ Kitchen, our very first project. Rina proposed opening a feeding kitchen for the children in her section of the Indian Village. They typically only eat one small meal per day. The idea is for the children to come to Rina’s Kitchen to receive a meal of rice, dhal (lentils), chapati (whole grain bread), and milk. She will buy the supplies and do the cooking. GCA will buy the supplies and pay her a monthly “salary” of something like $50. This salary will roughly double her monthly income taking her from $600 per year to $1,200 per year, which will make a huge difference in the lives of her and her three children. (Her husband ditched her for another woman who paid for him to return to India.)
Rina is illiterate, but I have asked her to collaborate with a person, like Arti, literate in English to come up with a written plan. If it works out, I plan to call the project Rina’s Kitchen, just like we called our very first project Frances’ Kitchen. Remember that one?
Rina and her two children on my latest visit to Nepal.
One last thing about the Indian refugees in Kathmandu. Nepal has very strict anti-conversion laws. It is a crime for a person of one religion to try to convert someone of another faith to their religion. Of course, this law is rarely, if ever, applied against Hindus or Buddhists, the religions of power in Nepal, but is primarily reserved for Muslims and Christians who try to convert Hindus or Buddhists. Last Saturday, God was really tugging on my heart to invite Rina to church with me the next day. Naturally, I didn’t want to get arrested, but on the other hand, God expects us Christians to share our faith with unbelievers.
The next morning, I threw caution to the wind and invited Rina to church. I told her to meet me there and asked her to please not tell anyone that I invited her. Well, not only did she show up, but she brought three of her Hindu friends with her. By the second praise song, they were singing all the choruses and all listened intently to the sermon on waiting on the Lord! Only one of the Hindus who came, Arti, is literate, so the next day I bought her a Bible at the Maranatha Bible Bookstore of Kathmandu, as well as some other Christian literature. Arti and I loaded an app onto Rina’s phone called Bible.is that has oral bibles in almost every language imaginable, including Hindi, and Rina promised she would listen to it.
Please pray for my Hindu friends, that the Word of God would catch fire in their hearts and they would be delivered from Hinduism, truly one of, if not the, most sad and binding of all world religions.
— Niles Sharif, President
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