For much of her childhood, Rijya believed she was an orphan.
That’s what her papers said and that’s what the Nepalese operators of her foreign-funded orphanage in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, told her.
But that narrative fell apart when the parents of other “orphans” at her privately run home started showing up at the gate demanding to see their daughters. “The caretakers would chase them away and we were told never to mention them in front of the foreign donors,” she recalls.
Eventually Rijya, who prefers to be identified by a pseudonym, learnt the truth. Both her parents were alive and she had been trafficked to Kathmandu at the age of two because her family was in financial difficulties.
Now 22, she and her teenage brother are supported by Hope and Homes for Children (HHfC), which works across nine countries to help children out of orphanages by reuniting them with family or placing them in foster homes.
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The charity is one of three chosen for this year’s Times and Sunday Times Christmas Appeal.
HHfC’s support enables them to live together as a family and continue their education. At the age of 12 Rijya was reunited with her parents by Forget Me Not, an organisation that partners with HHfC in Nepal, but they both died shortly afterwards.
In Nepal, care homes often have a vested interest in children being apart from their families. Almost all are privately run and more than 90 per cent of the funding comes from abroad.
This has effectively turned care into an industry in which children are trafficked to the tourist hubs: Kathmandu; Chitwan, famous for its rhinos; Pokhara, a trekking mecca, and the area around Mount Everest, where they are used to elicit donations from visitors.
“If those funds were deployed in other ways, many of these children could stay with their families,” says Tessa Boudrie, Asia director for HHfC.
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Since 2019, HHfC has worked with the Nepalese government to close exploitative homes and reunite children with their families. Where that isn’t possible, they train local families to act as foster carers.
“The best scenario is that families don’t break up in the first place, so a lot of work is also done around prevention,” says Anju Pun, Nepal director of Forget Me Not.
Nepal is one of the world’s poorest countries and in addition to social problems such as outward migration and alcoholism, it is prone to earthquakes and floods that often displace people from their homes and ruin their livelihoods.
Yet it is also a place of stunning natural beauty and every year it attracts more than a million visitors, drawn by the Hindu and Buddhist architecture, big fauna — rhinos and tigers — and the snowy peaks of the Himalayas.
“The agents go deep into the mountains to find these children,” says Dhan Bahadur Lama, whose organisation, The Himalayan Innovative Society, also partners with HHfC.
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Lama has worked on hundreds of family reunifications and says in most cases it was the promise of a good education offered by the orphanages that convinced parents to let their children go.
He tries to stymie the flow by alerting parents to the dangers. He tells them how he has found children covered in lice and riddled with scabies in care homes, warning parents that they risk prosecution for handing a child to a stranger.
One case stands out for Lama: a barn of about 130 children on the outskirts of Kathmandu which was operating as a feeder centre for homes in the city.
He said it was soaked in cow urine and the children had to sleep between two mattresses to keep warm because there were no blankets. In the end only two children were found to be real orphans.
HHfC estimates that roughly 85 per cent of children in Nepalese institutions have at least one living parent but that even if the home doesn’t tell them they are an orphan — as they did with Rijya — the children often lose contact with their family.
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For Sushil Babu Chettri, a film-maker who documents the lives of street children in Kathmandu and grew up in a home himself, the exploitation is clear and galling.
“You become a product, an exhibit at a zoo,” he says.
HHfC monitors children it has helped after they turn 18 and insists they be included in consultations over the future of care in the country. Most are adamant that the system is broken.
“I could have been sent to live with my aunt if someone had invested in that outcome,” says Dipti, now 27, who was sent to the same home as Rijya.
Their friend Uma struggles to hold back tears when recalling how her mother used to stand at the gate of the home. “I thought she must be my aunt because we had been told we were orphans,” she said.
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In 2010 the United States suspended international adoptions of children reported abandoned in Nepal because so many had fake documentation. It prompted an overhaul of the country’s care system but unregistered homes remain.
“We will always need a small number of homes but not nearly as many as we have now,” says child welfare office Pushpa Bam, who works in one of Kathmandu’s 11 municipalities.
As we sit in her office, she makes a call to ask about two arrivals at a nearby care home. Already the home has posted pictures of the children to their Instagram and Facebook accounts asking, in English, for donations.
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