A story from Nepal By Anonymous (for protection)

In the dry winter months, Abai, my grandmother, and I would take our livestock and move into makeshift accommodations by the edge of the woods, where more fodder was available for our cattle. Following this tradition, in the winter of 2005, we moved with our livestock to the woods, about half an hour away from our remote mountainous village of Western Nepal. Men in uniforms came to our accommodations every so often asking for food and shelter at night. Though we had very little to spare, we would never refuse to feed them. And we never asked them who they were because it was safer not to know. They could be the army. They could be Maoist insurgents. Refusing to provide shelter to the Maoist insurgents would put us at risk of ruthless punishments; providing such support, however, left us vulnerable to reprisal attacks from the state security forces who would suspect and punish us as active sympathizers of the Maoists. Unable to endure this violence and frequent crossfires between the Maoists and the security forces, Abai and I fled from our village. It took us six days to walk to a road head to get a bus to the Indian border, where we worked until the decade-long war ended in the winter of 2006.

I grew up in a time when my war-torn country, Nepal, was going through a significant political transition. Despite all the government's efforts to end the decade-long civil war and establish a federal regime, the problems faced by the ordinary people, especially women, only continued to worsen. I witnessed how the war severely affected women ex-combatants and non-combatants and noticed how the conflict had different and contradictory effects: both categories of women experienced shift in gender roles, with women taking on tasks earlier reserved for men, but this effect was strongest amongst ex combatants during conflict since the war left in its wake an awareness that the involvement of women in every sector of society is fundamentally important. In the aftermath of conflict, these changes were, however, partly reversed and especially ex-combatant women faced severe livelihood challenges and returned to traditional gender roles. These challenges have remained due to the lack of authenticated data on conflict-affect women, in the inadequate operational rollout of legislation, in the lack of access to appropriate services and compensation, and in the way that female ex-combatants are treated and reintegrated. During the insurgency, gender-specific violence caused Nepali women and girls unimaginable suffering. There was a lot of rape, sexual assault, and torture on both sides of the conflict. Women who were allegedly associated with either side of the conflict were subjected to sexual violence as a form of punishment. Women who became pregnant after being raped had limited access to safe abortion services. Gender disparities that were ingrained in traditional religious and social practices were also made worse by the insurgency. With an increasingly unstable food supply, unequal food distribution threatened the health of women and girls, leading to severe anemia and malnutrition. Because girls were forced into the workforce in order to support the family, their already limited educational opportunities were further hampered. Girls without formal education or training were frequently compelled to work in abusive situations. Given that health posts were frequently targeted for destruction, women were frequently forced to give birth in unhygienic conditions. After being trafficked out of conflict zones, most women and girls have ended up as victims of domestic and sexual slavery in other parts of Nepal and India.

As I write this story, my eyes are frequently falling on my picture with my Fupu, my aunt, which I have hung on the wall of my dorm room. "It has been hard to survive here, but there is no other option except this…" she would say, pointing to the leaking ceiling and broken windows of her old and cramped accommodation facility in Jordan's garment factory, where she'd flown eleven years ago using all of her life's savings to pay for the journey in search of a better life. My Fupu belonged to a lower-caste, marginalized ethnic group in a remote hill village in Western Nepal. She was pushed into the Maoist (rebel) fold to fight against the state for security from relentless atrocities and repression in her area and, most importantly, by the promise of gender equality. But, these promises remotely lived up to expectations post-war. Life became 'colorless,' as she would say, because of the lack of education and employment opportunities as promised, forcing her into the same life she had joined the war to avoid.

Growing up in a decade-long civil war and witnessing the socio-political struggles of women in post-war and prolonged conflicts, like my Fupu, has shown me the impact that war had on their communities, their families, and their own bodies. Seeing Fupu, who left everything behind and fought fearlessly in the civil war for the dream of creating a society that would benefit the poor and marginalized like her, not getting to see the dream fulfilled would often bother me. It troubles me that I am writing her story from a place of comfort while she, like many other ex-combatants, continues to struggle—not just to survive in a country that she struggled to call home—but to remember her own humanity despite the most inhumane treatment she faced during the war. Fupu also taught me that peace-building goes beyond just preventing conflict and violence but also enabling people, especially women caught up in conflict, to have equal access to educational, political, and economic opportunities. This has inspired me to seek ways to help amplify the voices of the lived experience of women in war-afflicted and post-war countries and encourage them to participate and benefit equally from their governance systems, to have income security and economic autonomy. This has further reinforced my interest in the role of politics in the post-war reform of women, that is, how can political and economic reforms address and solve women's concerns in post-war situations?

Experiencing the civil war and situation of women up-close as a child prompted in me a deep feeling of dislike for politics and repugnance towards politicians. Politics, for me, only meant fear, and I felt it as something that only brought suffering for the innocent. Time only served to justify this feeling more when the skyrocketing prices of daily necessities, lack of economic opportunities, and power shortage were routine, forcing us all into spiraling poverty. It seemed as if politics was all about using people to benefit a few to get to power. Hence, growing up, I bought the narrative that politics was a dirty game of fake speeches and hollow promises that involved troubling and killing innocent people, and I would never be a part of it. Now, I have a completely different viewpoint. Even though my country has abandoned protracted and brutal conflicts, the fault lines that fueled these conflicts remain. Instead, they have resurfaced and continue to have an impact on both women and the country's socio economic and political milieu. As such, I believe that as a citizen and a woman, we must all participate actively to create a positive impact in our country's politics and economic state.

Unlike many families in my village who expected their daughters to be responsible for a heavy load of household chores, my Fupu took those burdens off my shoulders so that I could go to school. She would often say that she had big dreams for me, perhaps because she saw her own tragically disappear somewhere with the smoke of the gunfires in the civil war.  She would say, "I want you to go to school and be a 'big' person.” I hope I can live up to her dreams, and work for many more Fupus so that their war-time sacrifices do not go in vain—so that they do not have to accept Jordan’s garment factory as the end point of their journey.