Nepal's 'Mother Teresa' Has Rescued Over 18,000 Girls from Sex Trafficking

[JimGinPA]

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/nepals-mother-teresa-has-rescued-over-18000-girls/?fbclid=IwAR2mIVat64Vc3TgP_fAH0E-9WiWDceAdCo5PQ2iaqRtuM8hrr-ULGUzxYqs

Anuradha Koirala works to help exploited Nepali women and children sold into sex slavery.

Inspired by Mother Teresa, Anuradha Koirala always knew she was destined to serve people. So she became a teacher, educating young children in Kathmandu, Nepal. But after two decades, she decided to pursue an even greater calling: protecting women and girls from abuse, trafficking, and exploitation.

On her morning walks past the Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu in the early 1990s, Koirala would regularly encounter women begging on the street. She was drawn to them and began to engage the women in conversation — they all told her that they had been victims of some type of gender-based violence, she recalled in her 2015 TEDx Talk.

Koirala was far too familiar with their pain, having suffered extreme physical abuse at the hands of her ex-husband.

"Every day, there was battering. And then I had three miscarriages that I think [were] from the beating. It was very difficult because I didn't know in those days where to go and report [it], who to...talk to,” she told CNN in 2010.

Her decision to change careers was triggered by her traumatic personal experience.

Koirala began educating the women about gender-based violence and the empowerment of women. She offered to help them support themselves if they stopped begging on the streets.

At first, just eight women took her up on her offer, and she gave them 1,000 rupees each from her meager earnings to start small street shops. Through a portion of their profit — the two rupees that Koirala would collect from each of them daily — she was then able to provide security and economic opportunity to other women in need.

Soon after, she took her mission a step further, founding the nonprofit Maiti Nepal in 1993, through which she has served exploited women and children for the last 26 years. Throughout her career as a humanitarian and activist, she has specifically focused on tackling sex trafficking, a rampant industry that forces young girls from underprivileged communities across the India-Nepal border to be sold into sex slavery.

~More at link

~The article is dated July 17, 2019, but just popped up on my FB newsfeed today

[marybourg]

1. I hope she's kinder to women and girls than Mother Theresa was.

[Karadeniz]

2. Thank goodness for soul work.❤