Ep. 22: Carry That Hope

In 1994, Charimaya was kidnapped from her village in Nepal and taken thousands of miles away. What she did from this horrifying experience is an incredible example of hope, courage, and strength.

Transcript

Hi, and welcome back to crime on the Clark Fork. The true crime podcast, where I tell you about big crimes that happen in small places, with each case having occurred in areas with populations of fifteen thousand or less. My name is Mackenzie Spence, and I am your host. I am sorry this episode is late. Once again, you've heard it from me before. This fall was absolutely insane with work and school and everything else. But the semester is finally over, so I'm really hoping to get episodes out on time moving forward, but I'm not going to make any promises because I've done that before. And here we are again with a late episode. I am getting this out at least during the month, and I'm not skipping a month like I have in the past, so I hope that's okay. Again, I apologize for the late case, but here we are, episode twenty two, and I'm just going to hop right on into it and not make you guys wait any longer for this case. So the sources for this episode are Wikipedia, Caritas, BBC, US Department of State, Liverpool John Moores University, medium, Our Rescue, the Weekend Leader, CNN, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Haibun V.d.c. Sindhupalchok district, Nepal nineteen ninety four population Two thousand four hundred and eighteen. Shara Maya Tamang was sixteen years old when she woke up thousands of miles from her village in Nepal after being drugged while walking in the forest alone. When she came out of the drugged sleep, she was in an unfamiliar room where she wanted to leave. She would have to get through more than one locked door to do it. Shah Amaya grew up in the hill country of Nepal, where she was the youngest of four children. She spent her time working on her family's farm and going to school. Her family was middle class, her father was a plumber and her mother was a housewife, and they were able to sustain their need for food and clothing through her father's work and selling items from their family farm each year. She went through her primary school education in her village, which was not really common at the time, but her older brother wanted to make sure that his little sister was educated, so she was actually able to go to school through fifth grade. She then continued her education with other young women in her village outside of the Nepal school system. Jeremiah's father passed away when she was sixteen years old, which left her without a guardian, as mothers were not able to be seen as guardians for others in Nepal. Her father was also the guardian of her village, which left the entire community at a loss when he passed. Prior to her abduction, Jeremiah had been approached by a man who had complimented her on how smart she was and told her that she shouldn't be wasting her intelligence working on her family's farm, but rather in the big city where she would have better opportunities. Now, she was pretty wary of this man because she knew that men often went to these villages in Nepal to buy young women and then sell them to businesses or brothels, where they would be forced into prostitution, beggary, or labor. She had actually read a book about these human traffickers, and knew that the work that they often promised didn't actually exist, and they would take young women into the cities where the women didn't know what was truly going to happen to them. On top of this, Jeremiah had also seen girls who she didn't recognize that were actually hidden in a hut in her village, which led her to point out to others that the trafficking that they had heard about may actually be happening where they live, and she often talked Two to other young women in her village and her friends about this, to be on the lookout for these men and even women that would come into their communities and promise work to then sell them for labor. Now, because Charmaine was so wary of these men, they waited until she was alone and vulnerable to abduct her on the day of her abduction. Jeremiah would have normally been with other women from the village cutting grass, but on this day she was walking alone in the forest to bring food to the livestock on her family's farm. And while she was walking alone, four men came out of the forest, tied her hands behind her back, and forced her to swallow an unknown, powdery substance. And the next time she woke up, She was in a city in northern India. When she looked outside, she saw the tall buildings and demanded to the men who had taken her that they needed to take her back to her village. They told her that they were going to get her a job in Kashmir, where she would weave shawls, and from this she remembers that during this time India was incredibly hot, which was really unfamiliar compared to the chilling breeze of her village in Nepal. And even though she was overheating at this time, when she awoke, she refused to drink anything the abductors offered her in case they had drugged that as well. Now, unfortunately, her thirst became so bad that she didn't really have a choice but to drink the soda they offered her, which, as she feared, was drugged and the drugs took over and she once again went unconscious. When she awoke again, she was in Mumbai and although she didn't know the city was Mumbai, um, she found out later. The men stopped at a restaurant where they brought Sharmila inside and they met a woman. Sharmila recalls that there were actually a lot of people in the restaurant, and even though she was bawling and crying, no one that was there in the restaurant went up to see if she was okay, and soon after that, the men tricked her into getting into a taxi where the men that she was with and had been with left, and she was just left with the woman from the restaurant who was introduced to her as aunty. The driver brought Aunty and Sharmila to a brothel, which is where she was then locked behind three separate doors. Now Shamaya was often threatened once she got to the brothel, and if she indicated that she would prefer that the staff there wouldn't bathe her, they would burn her with boiling water. And if she refused to do something that they asked of her, they would threaten to send her to a brothel that was worse than the one that she was currently in. There were other Nepali women there who would often try to make her feel better, or tell her stories of how they ended up there, but most of the stories were the same. The woman had been promised a job or promised an arranged marriage, and most of the women were looking for something that was better than from where they had come from. The woman would often tell Shamaya that she would get used to being in the brothel and doing what was asked of her, but she really didn't think that she would. Not long into her imprisonment. Sharmila began to gather information. She learned that police officers would come by at least once a week, and Auntie, the owner of the brothel, would pay them a bribe. She was sure that one day she would get out of there and would tell herself that when she was able to get back to her village in Nepal, she would tell other women how the trafficking works and that she would report on it. In this brothel, she was left in a room with no windows, a bed, a table and one chair. She was often raped, beaten and burned with cigarette butts, and because of this torture that she endured her hope to escape and return to her life slowly began to deteriorate and depression took hold. She even thought that if she did escape, the stigma that is associated with her experiences brought her even further distress. She eventually got so depressed that she attempted to commit suicide by hanging herself. but the fabric she was using ripped and she fell to the floor, and in an interview, she states that she remembers feeling like everything was impossible, including killing herself, and she felt like she was a dead person that was living. Now Shah Maya was locked in that brothel for twenty two months. Nearly two years before police officers raided the brothel and freed her and the other women who were being held there. She never got used to being there like the other woman had said she would. She soon learned that she had been held in the red light district of Mumbai, and this was the first time she knew she was in Mumbai. That day in nineteen ninety six, there were five hundred women who were under the age of eighteen that were rescued from Mumbai brothels, which, if they're that young, can you even call them women yet? Five hundred women under the age of eighteen, and even more that were over the age of eighteen. When these women were finally free. Those that were from Nepal attempted to get back to their homes, which required them to lobby the Nepalese government. The government did not want to allow them to return because they stated that the women were bad and might bring HIV into the country. This led the women to have to stay in shelters in India for six full months, and the conditions of the shelter that Shah Amaya stayed at was anything but welcoming. She recalls that the conditions were inhumane and made the women feel like they were prisoners once again, and not victims of horrendous crimes against them. It wasn't uncommon for the women to be sexually assaulted in the shelters, and when they needed medical care, the doctors actually would see them as untouchable and refuse to care for them. Or if they would agree to give them care, They would only do so if they wore multiple layers of gloves before touching them. There were many girls and young women who died of typhoid, Aids, and jaundice because they didn't get that timely care from medical professionals, and there was even a fourteen year old girl that had contracted Aids from her abusers at the brothel that she was rescued from that was refused medical care by the warden of the shelter, stating that the girls who survived were no saints and deserved what they got. And that girl died not long after being refused the medical care she needed. Eventually, charities who help victims of human trafficking stepped in and put pressure on the Nepalese government to let the women go home, which actually worked, and over one hundred and twenty eight other Nepali women were able to get into their home country of Nepal, and there were several organizations that took the lead on rehabilitating the women, and this rehabilitation included offering them human rights training, as well as counseling that attempted to affirm that they were not the ones that are to blame for that terrible abuse and exploitation that they experienced. Sharmila was rehabilitated by an organization called Nava Jyoti Kendra, and she lived in their center for six months. During this time, she returned to her home village of Habung, but she was not welcomed with open arms and the members of her village actually shouted at her and were fighting about her return, and her and her family were given death threats by the villagers she once called neighbors and friends. It was so bad that she only stayed home for two hours before leaving. Sharmila began to look for ways to hold her traffickers accountable for what they had done to her, and With the help of sisters from the Catholic Church, she was able to file charges against the men who abducted her, and she was the first of the trafficked women from the brothel that filed charges, which led to four of her abusers being found charged and put in jail for ten years, with the other abusers being sentenced to only a couple of years in jail due to a certain law that I couldn't quite figure out or get my hands on. Um, but there was some loophole that they found where they were only sentenced to a couple of years instead of the ten that the other four, um, were charged with. After her abusers were put in jail, she began to advocate for other victims of human trafficking, which included urging governments across the world to look at the girls who are trafficked as victims instead of criminals. Today, Sharmila is married with two children, and she leads sessions for groups who are at risk of being trafficked. To raise awareness and warn them on what they should watch out for. She tells them that if they're offered a job, they need to make sure that they know exactly what that job is, where the job is located, and what contact numbers there are for the position. She also runs a shelter for girls and young women, who are between fifteen and twenty two years old, and oversees different programs for survivors of human trafficking. She, along with fourteen other survivors who returned to Nepal, together founded a nonprofit in Nepal called Shakti Samuha that is working against women trafficking from Nepal into India. Shakti Samuha translates to power collective and their goal is to empower other women who have been trafficked so they would not have to experience the same social stigma and exclusion that they had to back in nineteen ninety six. The organization was the first in Nepal that was created and run by survivors of human trafficking. Now, the organization is in partnership with USAID and continues a network of seventy three adolescent groups, twenty two survivor groups, and three women's protection committees led by rural women. In twenty eleven, Sharmila was presented with an Anti-Trafficking Hero Award by then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and in twenty thirteen, Shakti Samuha won Nepal's Ramon Magsaysay Award, Which is considered to be the Nobel Peace Prize of Asia. In nineteen ninety six, CNN wrote an article on the Nepali girls who were trafficked into the sex trade in India. They interviewed a brothel manager who told them that the customers like Nepali girls because they have lighter skin than Indian women. They don't have sexual inhibitions and are more likely to agree to requests and demands from customers. At this time, in nineteen ninety six, the customers of the brothels paid fifty to sixty rupees, which was just under two US dollars, and most of the Nepali girls were sold to the brothels for three hundred to five hundred dollars. At the age of twelve or thirteen, the brothel manager went on to say that even if the girls leave, they would come back because they would miss the fun and independence of their lifestyle, which is absolutely disgusting considering they did not choose to go there. Well, there may be some women who choose to stay in sex work if they're not being held hostage, saying that the women who were stolen from their lives in childhood want to continue to pursue a life of sex. Work in dangerous conditions is unreal. For many, they are enslaved through debt bondage, being required to pay the aunty of the brothel back for how much they paid for them, plus the amount of materials, medications and anything else that had been spent on them while they had been trapped there. Over the course of their enslavement, it's estimated that the girls make brothel owners up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. If you didn't know. Trafficking from Nepal to India is something that is still far too common today. Thousands of women and young girls are forced, tricked or sold into human trafficking in India, as well as African and Gulf countries. And from twenty fourteen to twenty fifteen, there was a five fold increase in the human trafficking of young women and girls from Nepal to neighbouring countries. The rise of social media and new technology has made human trafficking so much worse. Instead of men having to go to villages in Nepal to talk to women and convince them to go with them for jobs. Or steal them from their homes. In this case, the traffickers are able to find young girls on social media, send them a message, and wait for their reply. The likelihood of being trafficked is so high in Nepal that there is a law that states that women who are under the age of thirty are not allowed to migrate to another country without the permission of a guardian. And again, the age of thirty and a guardian includes a parent or a husband. An organization called Our Rescue provided the funds for CCTV cameras that were placed near the border of Nepal in India, which is an open border to assist in monitoring those that may be at risk of being trafficked while they're crossing the border. Since these cameras were installed, law enforcement and Shakti Samuha have been able to identify and intercept over seven hundred different people who are at risk of being trafficked. Now, Kamiya did incredible things that unfortunately did come out of a terrible crime against her, and she used this to save other people. And I think that is so incredible. And that's why I wanted to share her story. And I want to leave you with a quote from Kamiya. and I quote, we have to have a sign of hope after night. We have day. We should carry that hope all the time. End quote. And that is the end of this case. As always, please give me five stars on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. And if you're into writing reviews, feel free to give me a review on Apple Podcasts. As always, I'm always looking for cases to cover, so if you have a suggestion, please visit the link in the show's Instagram page at crime on the Clark Fork, where I also post pictures from the cases that I cover. So if you want to go, give that a quick follow. Um, let me know your thoughts on this case and other cases that I have done, and I hope you enjoyed this episode. I will catch you next time with more big crime in small places.