The Tufts Route to Fixing the World's Rough Spots
The Boston Globe
A column by David Nyhan, originally published on Sunday, March 1, 1998

This is the story of how two young women, with just their freshman year at Tufts University behind them, went to Nepal last summer to learn firsthand what should be done and what can be done about the slave trade that takes poor peasant girls from their mountain villages to the bordellos of India and the Middle East.

Aparna Basnyat, 18, is from Nepal. Now a sophomore at Tufts, daughter of a United Nations engineer, she returned home to Katmandu last summer with Carolyn Hunt, 20, whose parents grow grapes on a farm in upstate New York in a town of 500.

They did not go as tourists to hike, climb, or take pretty pictures. They interviewed everybody they could find to write a report on the ugly traffic that sees between 5,000 and 7,000 Nepali girls sold into sexual bondage every year, to the filthy, AIDS-infected brothels of India.

With an average annual income of $ 180, with an open and unpoliced border with India, and with the AIDS epidemic fueling a demand for ever-younger and supposedly uninfected prostitutes, Nepali girls as young as 5 are sold or stolen for the sex trade. In one village, there were virtually no young girls left; villagers lied and said only boys were born to the women there.

The pair interviewed social workers, officials, medical authorities, and the villagers themselves. They prepared a thick binder full of photos, computer printouts, letters, reports, and transcripts of interviews and field work. With guidance from experts at Tufts, the two plan to go back next summer, with two more recruits and money from the Vision Program, to improve the treatment of AIDS-infected women, for whom there is little hope of modern medical intervention.

Katmandu itself suffers from the exploitations of modernism. Tourists come, some looking for what is to be found in the 500 brothels operating in a city of barely 100,000. For those Nepalis who can afford them, satellite television dishes bring in MTV and the other aspects of the video age. How does a young woman from upstate New York, and a town of 500 people, get involved with AIDS-infected prostitutes in Katmandu? Hunt laughed. It just sort of happened, she shrugged, as it might to "anyone who's interested in what's going on in the world, and why."

It was tough befriending young women who were about to die from untreated AIDS. "It was riding a big emotional roller coaster to know they were going to die," Basnyat said. "We came back from the summer very frustrated and upset. 'Where do we go from here?' " Hunt nodded. "What could we do from Boston? As young people, we had no big connections. We were just very young and idealistic."

So what they did was write up their findings, and hook up with the organizations already working in the field, making plans to return with specific plans for reintegrating rescued prostitutes into their native Nepali culture. To Hunt, "This is my way of justifying my being here, at this elite school that costs $ 30,000 a year." She and her friend know they are doing something vital.
This weekend they got to present their findings to a Tufts symposium on world refugee problems. Tufts is home base to the EPIIC (Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship) program for students who want immediate immersion in what's going on, right down on the ground, in the world's trouble spots.

Over 13 years, Sherman Teichman, the program's director, has dispatched students who rapidly develop into caseworkers, refugee re-settlers, bureaucrats, advisers, technicians, you name it, in 19 countries around the planet, including one, Kyrgyzstan, from the old Soviet Union, that had heretofore escaped my notice.

Last week's Thursday-Sunday symposium was on the theme "Exodus and Exile: Refugees, Migration and Global Security." With as many as 25 million or 30 million refugees sloshing around the earth, "from Armenia to Zimbabwe," as the program put it neatly, the outlook is for more, not fewer, of what the UN now calls "IDPs" - internally displaced persons.

Dr. Francis Deng, a Sudanese who is now the top UN official on IDPs, was awarded the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship prize. The growing need for better crisis response by the international community was emphasized by Roberta Cohen, a former US and UN official. "Conflicts within states in which civilians, not armies, are the primary targets have become the defining feature of the post-Cold War era," Cohen said.

General William Nash, who commanded the international task force in Bosnia, and Sarah Sewell, a former deputy assistant secretary of Defense, spoke of how peacekeeping can be a complicated business on the ground, where ethnic cleansing is practiced with barbarous efficiency.

Leila Abu-Gheida, 32, is a former Tufts undergrad who logged 10 years of World Bank, UN, Peace Corps and Africare work. She helped to run refugee camps in Africa, can get along in a half-dozen languages, and helped yank landmines in Bosnia. Why? "I wanted to know about what was going on."

She now has a keen appreciation for principles of organization, bookkeeping, accounting, keeping track of the money. She learned how to deal with burnout, compassion fatigue, and "the God complex," where a snap decision made by an over-stressed relief worker can have ramifications on a refugee family for generations to come.

Is the experience depressing? "It's not depressing to me," Abu-Gheida said. She learned early to avoid getting involved in medical programs, where people frequently die. She learned to control emotions after seeing 20 refugees struck by a speeding food truck. She learned how to deal with village strongmen who might be rogues but whose cooperation was essential to get food distributed.

She relishes that her efforts made a difference. "I would say I need a lot of challenge - I haven't hit a limit yet. It keeps you sharp." Oh, and one more thing about running a 250,000-refugee camp for Rwandans in Tanzania: "I learned that you don't stay in the camp after dark."