Baglung women work on AIDS prevention

KISHOR RIMAL

HELPING OTHERS: Devi Pathank, her daughter, Sita Pathak and Sitaram Thapa work in Baglung to help people living with HIV.

Baglung is called the 'District of Lahures'. It has more migrant workers in proportion to the population than any other district in Nepal.

In villages after villages between Baglung and Beni, houses are shuttered up, and there are only women, the elderly and children to be seen.

The Baglung district administration estimates that 65 percent of the young men in the district live and work in Qatar or Malaysia. They send home an estimated Rs140 million a year in remittances. If the money from Baglung migrant workers in India and soldiers in the Indian Army are added, the total is much more.

But there is more than just cash coming back to Nepal, workers are also bringing home HIV and infecting their wives. Although the Midwestern hill districts of Achham and Doti are worse off because of the higher proportion of unskilled workers in India, the epidemic is spreading in Baglung as well.

Sita Pathak of Balewa in Baglung was happy when her husband moved to India. He came home for holidays and brought back his earnings, but she only realised later that he had also infected her with HIV. By the time she got her test, it was too late.

Her husband died three years ago, and despite the stigma Sita has now turned into an activist to help spread awareness to other women like her whose husbands work abroad. "I only have my daughter and other sisters like me, I will live for them," Sita says.

Devi Pathak is also from Balewa and was also infected by her husband who works in India. When she found out, she contemplated suicide. But like Sita she has dedicated herself to helping others like her.

Sita and Devi work with a local AIDS awareness group that has 70 members, of whom 50 were infected by husbands working in India. At least five of the women were infected by husbands who worked in the Gulf.

"Stigma and ostracisation means that it takes a lot of courage to come out openly to admit they have HIV," says Sitaram Thapa, who works with the AIDS awareness group which works with prospective migrant workers, with their families back home in Nepal and with the general population.

On the main street of Burtibang village there are only old men and women and children on the streets. "If there were jobs here, they wouldn't have left," says 70-year-old Santosh Pun, whose only son when to India to work as a porter and never returned. He was diagnosed as HIV positive and died last year.

Pun's eyes glisten as he tells us: "I have lost my son, but whose duty is it to protect the other sons and daughters of Nepal?"