Rajendra Nath

For 30-year-old Kamala Khatri, a woman of Raniyapur-1 of Banke , it was an ordeal that never seemed to end. However, after three-and-a-half months of intense toil and physical abuse from her Kuwaiti employer, she is now home, but with emotional scars, a shaven head and without money.

Khatri had gone to Kuwait to work as a domestic help through Balkrishna Poudel, a foreign employment agent of Nepalgunj. She said she fell ill due to the hard work she was put into and when she was bedridden, her employer hit her, tortured her mentally and shaved her head. After hearing of her plight, women involved with a local NGO , Safe Migration Network, sprung into action and sent her back home. After the NGO filed a complaint at the local administration to build pressure on the government to take steps to free her, Khatri’s employer handed her over to the agency through which she had landed in Kuwait.

Khatri claimed that the person representing her foreign employment agency in Kuwait was Poudel’s son Binod, who took away her pay.

Upon arriving in Kathmandu, Khatri collapsed at the airport. She spent a couple of days at a shelter run by Maiti Nepal, an NGO working against women trafficking, before returning to her village. With the help of a paralegal committee, Khatri is currently trying to sue the agents who sent her to Kuwait and recover her salary.

Khatri’s husband Dil Bahadur said he did not know if his wife had gone to Kuwait through legal means. He said that due to his physical debilitation and poor financial condition of the family, his wife had decided to go to Kuwait to earn money.

Many women fall into the trap of unscrupulous foreign employment agents and go to the Gulf countries and the Middle East, hoping for a job with good salary, only to return home after suffering physical and mental torture, said Chandrakala Poudel of the Safe Migration Network.

 Published on: 9 October 2012 | The Kathmandu Post