Nepal laborers risk jobs to go home
Many migrant workers overseas face an agonizing decision after massive quake devastates country
KATHMANDU, Nepal — The destruction on TV and his family’s despondent voices on the other end of the phone overpowered Shivaram Pariyar.
The construction worker summoned the courage to approach his supervisor at their office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and told him he had to return home to Nepal immediately.
The man, an Indian national, was unsympathetic. “The TV always exaggerates,” he said.
Pariyar, 31, pleaded with him, “Look how bad it is!”
It was not a simple case of a worker requesting unscheduled time off. The Saudi construction company was holding Pariyar’s passport, and he was not entitled to a holiday until he had completed two years of service. He had been there six months, and if he left early he could lose a job that he had struggled to get and that others coveted.
Hundreds of thousands of Nepalese migrant workers accede to such conditions as terms of their employment in the oil-rich nations of the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. It is a price that a growing number are willing to pay for jobs that bring in more than they could ever make in their impoverished home country.
Nepal is one of the world’s leading sources of cheap, low-skilled labor, with more than a half-million workers going abroad every year to places such as Kuwait, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The Nepalese government says that more than 7 percent of the country’s 28 million people work overseas; however, because so many migrate illegally, the actual figure is believed to be higher.
These distant laborers are a pillar of the economy: The money they send home accounts for a quarter of Nepal’s gross domestic product, according to official statistics.
Since the April 25 quake that authorities say has left more than 7,800 people dead across the country, many Nepalese overseas have faced the wrenching decision of whether to return home to their families if it means risking the jobs that provide for them.
“I was under so much stress, I couldn’t work for the last week,” Pariyar said. “I had to get home.”
His boss eventually agreed to let him take a 45-day emergency leave. After signing a letter saying he promised to return and shelling out $500 for a lastminute plane ticket — more than twice his monthly paycheck — Pariyar landed in Kathmandu early Tuesday, dragging a frayed suitcase behind him.
He tied a black handkerchief over his nose and mouth to guard against the thick fog of post-quake dust enveloping the capital. Near the long-distance bus depot, he bought a ticket for the next morning to his family village in eastern Nepal’s Lamjung district.
The worst images he’d seen on TV were confirmed in the neighborhood surrounding the bus terminal, where several blocks of shabby guesthouses were pancaked into mounds of concrete chunks and twisted steel, the air redolent with the odor of rotting flesh. The guesthouses are a frequent stopover point for migrant workers, several of whom were reported killed in the quake.
Pariyar entered the lobby of one surviving guesthouse to find a crack about two fingers wide snaking across the wall. He stepped back out into the street.
“I’m scared to stay he said.
The phone conversations with his wife and parents had been brief and tortured. They were reluctant to tell
here,” him how bad things were in Lamjung. All they said was the house was damaged and they were sleeping outside a school, but his 3-year-old son was unharmed.
Nirmal Kumar Upreti, an activist who is in touch with overseas Nepalese laborers, said dozens have contacted him via Facebook, asking for help returning home.
“They see all this devastation in the newspaper and TV channels, they hear from their relatives, and they think the worst,” said Upreti, deputy program director for the Pravasi Nepali Coordination Committee, an advocacy group.
“From their heart they want to come home and support their families and their villages. ... But it’s a big risk for them because if they leave, it’s not guaranteed that they will be able to go back.”
To get the jobs, migrants must pay “manpower companies,” middlemen that also arrange their visas and plane tickets. There are more applicants than jobs, and the fees can be steep; Pariyar had spent nearly $700 to get to Saudi Arabia, an investment that weighed on him as he suffered through his first few months in Riyadh.
He had never worked construction before and found the job — and the desert heat — grueling. Still, he was able to send home about $200 a month, not bad for a seventh-grade dropout.
So many Nepalese men in their 20s and 30s have left the country that entire families and villages seem to be missing a generation.
Jay Prakash Shreshta works as a driver for a company in Qatar while his wife lives with their five children and several other female relatives in an east Kathmandu neighborhood known as Pepsi-Cola, after a nearby bottling plant.
Shreshta’s father and younger brother are drivers in Bahrain. It was almost time for his semi-annual leave, which made it easier for him to rush back to Kathmandu after the quake.
His wife had given birth barely a week earlier, and the constant aftershocks left his mother paralyzed with fear.