The view from my hotel room window my first morning in Kathmandu included the famous Tuborg beer sign and new construction going on. The city was focusing all its energy and resources on building an infrastructure for tourism with the hope that it would become the lead 'industry' in Nepal and bring in lots of foreign capital.

I really wanted to stay in a Nepali hotel in Kathmandu so it was with some reluctance that first night that I agreed to stay with my colleagues in a western-style hotel so we could talk about the conference and make plans for the coming week. We had dinner at a new, western-style Chinese restaurant where I also felt uncomfortable. I was miffed because I wanted to begin my Nepali experience by eating Nepali food. The meal, on the other hand, was wonderful and the men around the table were personable and eager to help me acclimate to Nepal. They had all attended university in the US. The conversation was "heady", intensely intellectual, and mostly about the politics in Nepal and their perspectives on how the government should be run. I could feel the strong pull of entitlement and privilege that was groomed into these Nepali men.

Monsoon clouds like those we had flown through stack up over Kathmandu late in the day

On our way to the restaurant we passed a Nepali woman who was living on the street. I wanted to talk to her and asked one of the men to translate for me. He talked to her and repeated all my questions to her, or so I thought, and saying things back, answering me, but in a way that made no sense. My interpreter was impatient. He said I shouldn’t be talking to her in the first place and kept pulling me away. He said he wanted to catch up with the others so we left. A dozen yards along I broke away from him and went back to the woman on the street corner just as a second woman appeared that I had not seen. “That man didn't say one thing to her that you asked and he didn’t tell you one thing that she answered,” she said. “Can you meet me back here tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock,” I asked her? She said she would.

An Egg Walla out early in the morning in Kathmandu

The next morning I found a large group of women waiting for me including the woman who had stepped from the shadows the night before. She introduced herself as Renu Sharma Upreti, and said she was one of the directors of the Women’s Foundation of Nepal. She spoke English well and was compassionate in helping me understand Hindi and in particular telling me exactly what the women were saying. She translated as the women told me their stories. Almost all of them, when they were young girls, had been sold by their parents and forced to become prostitutes in India. They were thrown out of the brothels where they worked and lived when they contracted sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The Nepali government did everything it could to prevent the women from returning to Nepal but they found paths through the hills and along the rivers once used by traders and returned secretly (and at enormous risk) only to be rejected by their families. I was overwhelmed by the women’s stories and invited them to attend the conference. Their stories and stories of other women will be interwoven throughout this blog.

This photo was taken months later and includes some of the women I met that first morning in Kathmandu. The woman in the white T shirt on the left is Renu Sharma Upreti who had stepped out of the shadows the evening months before to talk to me. She is one of the founders and directors of the Women's Foundation of Nepal based in Kathmandu which does amazing work with and for Nepali women. It was an amazing coincidence that I met her in my first few hours in Kathmandu and that she was generous and gracious enough to take me under her wing. It was an enormous gift.

Urban couple commuting to work in downtown Kathmandu