Creating a better life for Nepal's lowest caste

[excerpted from Clarknews, winter 2006]

Bishnu Maya Pariyar, a graduate student in Clark's International Development, Community and Environment Program, has defied a more than 2,000-year-old caste system by becoming an educated Dalit woman and is breaking down the rigid Hindu caste system of Nepal by empowering other Dalit women through education and micro-finance groups.

Pariyar's story begins in the remote village of Taklung located in the Gorkha Province of Western Nepal. One of 11 children of subsistence farmers, her family lives under a caste system, a strict hereditary social class system in Hinduism that restricts people's occupations as well as their association with people from other castes. By age 10, Pariyar had already witnessed caste discrimination by seeing her father humiliated in front of his children and listening to her neighbor being beaten by her husband.

"I would always hear the crisis next door and say to myself, 'Why doesn't she stand up for herself and her children? Why does she not say anything?'" Pariyar recalls. "Then I realized that if she had independence she could take care of her children and herself. If there were laws against this, she could go to the police, but there are none. There isn't even any solidarity among the women because they are not allowed to talk to each other. I always wanted to do something about it, but it was only my dream."

Pariyar became the first girl in her community, of any caste, to graduate from high school and went on to attended Tribuvan University in Katmandu on a scholarship from the Himalayan Foundation and earned a degree in social work.

After two years of working for the Self Help Development Program, a nonprofit organization created to assist women and children through business and loan programs, and fighting with her director to lend to Dalits, Pariyar took things into her own hands. She brought her business plan to three American women who, in turn, gave her the seed money to start micro-financing groups for Dalit women. She taught women literacy and basic math skills, then gave them loans to start businesses of their own. The groups of newly empowered women, in charge of their new business ventures, grew into fully self-reliant, women-led financial organizations with the purpose of educating other Dalit women and men while building their common fund. So began the Association of Dalit Women of Nepal, now called Empower Dalit Women of Nepal (EDWON).

Pariyar, who earned a bachelor's degree at Pine Manor College and is now earning her master's degree in international development at Clark, remains committed to the now 1,500 women she has helped in Nepal. More than 700 children have been awarded scholarships to secondary school. One village was able to purchase its own water tap and build a temple where people of all castes worship together. Domestic violence has dramatically decreased in villages where these groups have been formed.

After graduating from Clark, Pariyar plans to go back to Nepal. Pariyar says that she will be most useful working hand-in-hand with her compatriots at the grassroots level‹not just talking about change, but teaching others how to implement it. She hopes to apply what she's learned at Clark to the problems in Nepal.

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