MY BEAUTIFUL MOTHER
(by Samjhana Koirala and Colin Woodley) March 2010
My mother has had to face so many obstacles in her life which we four daughters can hardly imagine. I don’t know where to start because it is so hard to find the sorrow words to start her story and the happy words to tell you about her today.
It is important for you to know that my aunties and uncles often told me that my mother was a beautiful child. As an early teenager they said she would have been the most beautiful young girl in Nepal. She is now 39 years and I notice men in our village still glance at her.
My mother’s family were very poor and my mother could not attend school. She was needed to earn money by working in another’s field to make it possible to join hands and mouth in a day, helping look after a younger sister, cooking, cleaning and cutting grass fodder for the cow and goats.
She would not have enjoyed her childhood very much. You may know that children as young a 10 are sometimes taken in marriage, so my grandmother, when she saw certain men walking up the track to the house, would hide her young daughter under the floorboards. She was always dressed in rags.
One day, when she was 14 years old, an important, rich man in our big village noticed her working alone in the fields. It is told that he walked up to her. After immediate negotiations with my grandmother (grandfather had left many years earlier with a second wife) my mother was married the next day. She was not asked by my grandmother whether she wanted this. My father took her as his wife by this ‘arranged’ type of marriage – which still happens all over Nepal but people tell me it is now a little less common in our big cities such as Kathmandu.
The big man had many friends in our village and they would have admired him for his catch. Soon she was pregnant and a daughter was born. As usual in our country, being a female baby, there were no celebrations.
Soon she was pregnant again and my father would have been feeling very happy with the prospect of a son, but another daughter was born. He scolded my mother and started beating her, saying that he wanted no more daughters, he wanted sons, and making threats to her. He gave her less food.
He started drinking wine and returning back at night very late. My mother became pregnant again and gave my father another daughter. You can imagine my father’s reaction – no joy, only more beating. Then my father had a relationship with another girl and stopped coming home every night.
This new girl was not nice and she had this relationship only for the money he gave her. Many nights, when he did return to my beautiful mother, he was drunk. Some bad nights he came home and made my mother sleep outside the house with her three young daughters. He had also started to gamble and he was losing his money.
My father was once very rich with a house, land and a motorcycle. His other relationship stopped and my mother became pregnant again. A fourth daughter was born. My greedy father and grandfather sold everything my father had not lost at gambling. At this time my father became very sick and died. We were told to leave the house, where we had been staying, and were pushed out the door. We had nowhere to go and no money.
My mother and we four children spent all that night just outside the house. When it was falling dark on the following evening one of the uncles appeared. He told my mother that we could spend this night in a vacant house high up on the mountain and he led us there with no belongings except for the clothes on our backs, one cow, two goats and a sickle to cut grass fodder.
That was eight years ago. We still live in this house today – my mother simply refuses to move – even though we have visits from this uncle demanding we move. But he knows we have no other shelter and leaves after protests without bad threats. He knows that we have no money at the end of every month because we only sell the cow’s milk and sometimes a goat.
I know why my father’s family, in fact the whole village, looks down on our family: my mother produced four daughters. We have no man to help us. Though no fault of our own! But this is Nepali culture and tradition for many past centuries.
My beautiful mother made one rule – whatever the weather, whether we were sick or not, we had to go to the government school in the valley every day. She often had to borrow money from a neighbour for our school clothes and the necessary annual books. Luckily, although we were female and very very poor, we do well at school and come first or second in our classes. Our teachers tell us we are clever.
During these past years of schooling, since my father’s death, life has been a constant struggle, which you will understand when you know we have black tea for breakfast and a dhal bhaat rice meal at night. Many nights our tummies are not feeling satisfied.
Recently I completed Year 10 and in the Nepali-wide exams and I got a first division pass and was accepted at Teacher College but after one month and not able to pay the fees of $7 per month the Principal made me stop coming to the College.
It was six months ago, when we were all still feeling badly over my expulsion, that the local school Principal came up to our mountain house to meet us with a social worker and Dr Woodley, who had already been told about my hope of becoming a teacher.
From this moment our lives have been turned around and bring to my mother happiness beyond her dreams. It happened so quickly. My sister and I both won sponsorships from CanHelp’s Australian supporters! I am back at College which I go to every morning and, hard to believe but true, I already have a job as a teacher in the afternoons by the kindness of the local Principal. He and the little children I teach are always making me feel wanted and a good teacher. My pay is $50 per month which is twice what my mother is earning from her cow and goats.
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