Anuradha Koirala is the CNN Hero 2010

Her work has now been recognized by the world. Read this
I hope more Anuradhas emerge in Nepal.

Let's not make it a meaningless stay

The United States of America! Almost every single person in my country harbors a dream to come here. Many want good higher education, many others want better lives. Some come from rich families, some even sell properties to buy a life here. I was one of the fortunate ones, who despite coming from a middle-class family, came here without spending a paisa.

My experience so far in this country or at least the part of the city where I am living, New York, has shown me different faces of Nepali people. I met someone who had a school in Gokarna, a suburb of the capital, Kathmandu, who came here on a DV (Diversity Visa). He was a principal of that school, and has two houses in Kathmandu, meaning he is rich enough. Here, he works at a subway, a sandwich-making store in other words, 12 hours daily. He is about 50 years' old.

I met another woman who came here 13 years ago, leaving her 7 years' old son with her husband. She had come on a tourist visa but did not want to remain a tourist; she overstayed. She even married an American, hoping for a Green Card. She didn't go back to Nepal, not even once.

Here, it took her years to pay the American guy, who had just done a paper marriage with her, in exchange of a large sum of money. Back home, her relationship with her husband worsened. Her son started living with her parents. Later the parents died and she sent the kid to Kalimpong for his studies. When I asked her what he was studying there, she said, "I don't know". It's not that she is illiterate and did not know, she said, "I have never asked him". Now she wants her son to come and stay with her. I wonder if, after all these years, they would have the natural bond of a mother and a son! She was not the one to raise him. She must have sent money for him but her physical presence was not there.

Then, I heard about some of my friends' stories. Despite coming from well-to-do families, they had made up stories about poverty and displacement in Nepal that wouldn't give them a space to live, therefore the asylum! I felt bad as they bad named our country. Many of the asylum seekers even today, after almost four years since the war ended in Nepal, tell the authorities that the Maoists won't let them go back and live in their homes. They would be pitied and granted asylum here. This means getting an American life, trampling on the dignity of a Nepali citizenship; citizenship of a country that has always been sovereign and never colonized.

These three cases are enough in explaining how people are forgetting their country. They ask a simple-sounding uncomfortable question: What did my country give to me? They fail to see what brought them here. Was it the money alone that they paid at the US Embassy in Nepal and the flight tickets that brought them here? Did their education not count? If they were not educated, would they be here? Their parents who sent them to schools, did they send them to manufacture ready made products for the US? Certainly not.

As a commonplace, I would also say--no job is a low job, however I say it with reservation. The school principal who came here is not doing what he is better skilled at. He did not have the education to make sandwich in a subway. He could have been inspirational in a country where half of the population is still illiterate. The woman who now has a green card doesn't have a job now. She is obese and diabetic, and she herself told me that she wasn't even getting a job to wash the dishes.

Apart from these depressing cases, I have however seen positive faces too. I met a group of people who live here, raise money here but build schools there. They identify villages where school buildings are needed and get the community work for it. They are not just creating jobs for locals but also making use of the natural resources available. For example, they use a mix of mud and cow dung for plaster. They said they want to make use of the locally available resources.

Whenever I introduce myself as a Nepali with foreigners, especially, the Americans, they have one 'as if a ready-made comment' about Nepal--a beautiful country. When I combine these comments and the sad stories, I realize Nepalis are coming here and the Americans are going back to Nepal. John Wood, for example, left his job at Microsoft to build schools and libraries, and he changed his mind to change the world when trekking in Nepal.

One girl from New Jersey who used her savings, when working as a babysitter here, to build a school in Nepal. She was barely 20 when she did that. My country people come here to work as babysitters to live a life here.

I am not sure whether these comparisons are sensible or not, but one thing for sure is we, the Nepalis, must do whatever we can to make our country better. If everyone comes here, with no intention of going back, it might be beneficial to the individual but not for the people who largely live in poverty. Besides, we need to know if we are living a kind of lifestyle that we 'deserve' rather than 'want'. Finally, if we don't want to be known as people of one of the poorest countries in the world, we need to change it. And it's only us who can do that.