By giving poor Nepalese families piglets to raise, Olga Murray has saved thousands of young girls from being forced into slavery.
Olga Murray, a woman from Sausalito, California, had been volunteering in Nepal for five years before she found out a horrifying fact about a nearby region: In southern Dang, poor farmers would sell their daughters as slaves to rich families, at a cost of $35 to $75. The families believed they had no alternative - without selling their daughters, they’d be unable to feed the rest of their families, and they would all starve to death. Nonetheless, Murray knew there had to be a better choice.
“These girls are 7, 8, 9 and 10, and no one was checking up on them,” Murray, now 83, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I was shocked.”
Murray quickly brainstormed a solution to keep girls safe at home. She knew that pork was a highly prized meat in the Nepalese community, and that a fully-grown pig could fetch the same price as one of the young girls at a market.
So, in 1989, she began going door to door visiting the poor farmers, offering them free piglets in exchange for keeping their daughters at home. By feeding and raising the piglets to full-grown pigs, the farmers would be able to sell the animals for meat at the annual Maghe Sakranti Festival, rather than selling their daughters into servitude. To sweeten the deal, she also offered to pay for the girls’ education through her nonprofit group, the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation, and even threw in a kerosene lamp and 2 liters of kerosene each month - rare commodities in areas without electricity.
The outcome wasn’t entirely positive, but out of the 37 Nepalese families she approached that first year, 32 took the deal. In the 19 years since, Murray and her nonprofit organization have made the same offer every year to poor farmers in southern Deng, and the local practice of selling girls into slavery has almost disappeared as a result: More than 3,000 girls have been given the opportunity to remain at home with their families, thanks to her ingenious plan. And thanks to her gift of education, many of these girls are flourishing.
“The local schools are full of former kamlaris (girl slaves), and the size of the classrooms are swollen, and girls are outnumbering boys,” Murray’s business partner, Som Paneru, wrote in an e-mail to the Chronicle. “We’ve already built over 35 new classrooms, but the need is still not fully met.”
Many of these former slaves, empowered by their education, have taken roles of activists, speaking out against the tradition of indentured servitude, fighting to make sure that their younger sisters remain free.
“At rallies, or on the radio, they promise out loud that their little sisters will never, ever go through what they did, and that’s when you hear them start to cry,” said Murray.