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Desperate for work, lured into danger



"Bishnu Hari Thapa," the woman called back.

"Turn on your television," the boy shouted.

















Meeting the middleman






More than 100 jobs were waiting for Nepalese men, the ad promised. They would fetch $200 to $500 per month. Just one month's salary would be enough to cover rent for Bishnu Hari's family for more than half the year. Enough for him to send his little brother to college.

Help wanted

With the American presence in Iraq making Amman a boom town, the city needed cleaners, laborers and laundry workers. Butchers, bus drivers and mechanics too. There were even four openings for a "salad man."

But there was a price to be paid to secure such a job, as there always is here. The agency's cut of the fee ranged from the equivalent of $1,000 to $1,285, a huge sum for a Nepalese boy.

"Preference will be given to candidates who have already worked in hotels," the ad stated. "Probable flight for selected candidates within two months."

Near the bottom of the ad was a logo, a crescent moon and six stars slung low over two mountain peaks. Arching over the stars and the mountains like a rainbow were the words "Moon Light Consultant Pvt. Ltd."

Moon Light also stated in the ad that a "demand letter" for the hotel jobs in Amman from its Jordanian counterpart--called Morning Star for Recruitment and Manpower Supply--was on file with the government, as required by Nepalese law. Job interviews were scheduled for the next day.

In less than three months, Moon Light's logo would become the focal point of rage for thousands of Nepalis wielding torches, tire irons and Molotov cocktails in their own streets. They would burn and loot Moon Light's office, along with scores of others.

But on June 13, it was still a symbol of hope for men such as Bishnu Hari.

He could have gone straight to the job agent himself. But instead, like many other inexperienced young men from rural villages, he entrusted his future to an older, more experienced man, the dalal who understood the world of overseas work. So he took the newspaper to Thapa.

Moon Light listed its Labor Ministry registration number in the ad, so Thapa figured it was aboveboard. He knew the office, so he took the young man from his village there.

If Bishnu Hari or any of the other men responding to the ad that day had questions about Moon Light, the firm's full-color brochure would have offered answers.

Printed on 42 glossy pages, it was more like a soft-cover book or the special edition of a top-selling magazine. "Our motto is `Right workers for the right job' so that all of our clients are happy with us," it announced on its first page.

Inside were copies of 32 demand letters from Moon Light's broker-counterparts in the Middle East, including Morning Star.

A smile and promises

The brochure also carried a picture of the smiling Prahlad Giri, Moon Light's general manager.

At 6 feet tall, Giri would have towered over most of the men who responded to the Moon Light ad. Although just 24, Giri ran Moon Light, his family's business. Dressed in a three-button suit, shirt collar open, he would poke the air with his slender fingers when he spoke or touch the tips of all 10 together and prop his hands below his sharp chin, like a man saying something profound.

Would-be workers swarm the offices of such brokers after job ads appear. Lines stream outside the doors, into hallways and even streets and alleys unprotected from the hot sun of Katmandu summers.

Among the job seekers, Bishnu Hari was a standout. Unlike many young Nepalese men, he had graduated from high school. He was experienced in wiring and welding. And he was ready to pay the fee.

Giri said in an interview that he didn't mention anything about Iraq to the applicants that day. Because of the danger, the Nepalese government had prohibited job agents from sending men there.

But Giri said he did offer Bishnu Hari and the others who interviewed a warning: Jordan's Morning Star is a multinational company, and it might send you somewhere else.

Bishnu Hari's dalal, though, said Iraq wasn't mentioned, only Jordan. In any case, at the end of the day, Bishnu Hari got the one piece of news he really wanted to hear: He had passed the interview. He was told to have his money ready.

Within days, Giri's office filed paperwork with the Nepalese Labor Ministry for Bishnu Hari and 34 others to head to Jordan for Morning Star. He and at least eight other men, the paperwork said, had contracts to work at Amman's five-star Le Royal Hotel.

In the days ahead, Bishnu Hari couldn't wait to get out of the New Bamboo Cottage--for good. He excitedly asked Thapa, the neighbor who recruited him, "When will I go?"

In late June, Bishnu Hari spoke by phone with his mother. It was time to pay the fee for the job, he told her, so please arrange to get the money.

She borrowed more than $2,100, about $400 of which came from the local development bank, a sort of savings and loan. The rest came from lenders in the village who charged 36 percent interest a month, she said.

Bishnu Hari made the five-hour bus ride back to Siudibar the next day to collect the cash.

If his mother had known what awaited her son, "I would have kept him by my side even if I had to do backbreaking work," she said. "For me, he was still like a newborn babe, just like a chicken that hatches from an egg."

The promise he made before leaving still echoes in her mind:

"Life is hard for us, Mummy. I will earn and send money home. We will buy land and build a small house to live in."

She handed him the cash, sending him out of their small apartment and back to Katmandu.

Into the unknown

Bishnu Hari was among many young men following a route that would take them to Katmandu and then to the Middle East. The 11 others who eventually would be kidnapped with him in Iraq also came from rural areas, stretching from the hills of northwestern Nepal to the nation's low-lying plains in the southeast.

They ranged in age from 18 to 27. Their lack of opportunity at home was evident in the professions written in their passports--"farming," "helper," "labor."

One of them, 19-year-old Ramesh Khadka, began his journey from a mud-and-brick home with a blue tin roof in a village where he helped farm his family's fields near the nexus of two majestic river valleys, the Nalu and Lele.

In another Nepalese village hundreds of miles away, three best friends who would later meet Bishnu Hari boarded a bus. Budhan Kumar Shah, Manuj Kumar Thakur and Lalan Singh Koiri were inseparable in their hometown of Mahendranagar, in Nepal's lower plains.

Just weeks before, a recruiter had trolled their village, promising that any willing young man could earn $700 a month serving food to U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

The three best friends had listened together intently. They and their families knew little of Iraq, the American war, its dangers or the nation's daily atrocities. "Don't worry," family members recalled the recruiter telling them. "You are working for American soldiers. The plane will take you to the camp, and in the camp there is no danger."

The oldest, Shah, marveled at the idea that just one-month's salary was more than four times what he earned all year as a ticket-taker at the local movie house. His two friends, Thakur, a 23-year-old college student, and Koiri, a 21-year-old farmer, were equally dazzled.

Together, they persuaded their families to borrow money to pay the broker, who had demanded $3,500 per head. And together they boarded a bus, which rolled down a road where oxen pull carts filled with dung and straw before passing under a canopy of mango trees and reaching Nepal's only east-west highway.

It would take them all night to reach the Nepalese capital.

Ominous call back home

Bishnu Hari flagged a taxi in early July outside the restaurant where he'd been working, and waiting, for weeks.

The cab took him to Katmandu's Tribhuvan International Airport, which fills nearly every day with young men headed to the Middle East. The volume is so great that Gulf Air even reconfigured its Boeing 767s to accommodate more workers.

Destinations roll across the airport's flight boards: Doha, Dubai, Manama, each a hub for the network that sends South Asians to labor in the Middle East.

Bishnu Hari and several of the other men took a night flight, landing at Queen Alia International Airport on the Fourth of July.

About three weeks later, he phoned Nepal. Bishnu Hari called the New Bamboo Cottage and spoke briefly with his younger brother, Krishna, who had taken his place at the restaurant in the hope of landing a job overseas as well.

Bishnu Hari started to ask his brother how things were, but the line went dead.

He called back later, and the fractured message he left haunts his mother to this day.

Go to Part 2

Copyright © 2014, Chicago Tribune
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