Anuradha Koirala Does It All at Maiti Nepal

The Maiti Nepal rescue and rehabilitation center has helped over 12,000 enslaved and abused girls and women since the early 1990s, and not one of the survivors has gone back to her former life. It's easy to see, then, why the group's founder, Anuradha Koirala, was recently nominated as a CNN Hero.

Nepal, ranked as a Tier 2 country in the U.S. State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report, is the land of opportunity for sex traffickers, who have little trouble convincing poor, often rural families to hand over their daughters. In a lot of cases, the family is acquainted with the trafficker, who will promise a great job for the girl, which translates to a better life for her, as well as money sent home to the family. Instead, she is stolen away and passed off to a brothel, where she'll be isolated from the world and forced to pay off new debts through sex with innumerable clients. Not exactly "a better life."

Herself a survivor of domestic violence, Koirala was motivated to use part of her $100 monthly teaching salary to start up Maiti Nepal back in 1993. It's grown since then, just a little bit, into a full-on operation of several centers throughout the country, which all offer free medical and psychological care, along with legal assistance. And the need for these services is great: in addition to the standard line of physical and emotional torments at the hands of traffickers and their clients, many of the women and girls suffer the stigma of illness, pregnancy, or single motherhood. They wouldn't be accepted by their families, even if they did go home. But Koirala takes them all.

Another cool, even badass, component of Maiti Nepal? An active border patrol made up of trafficking survivors who can spot the crime a mile away and stop it in its tracks. Of these girls, Koirala notes, "[They] need no motivation from me. They know the horrors of the brothel, and they are here to save their sisters." A typical day's work here will snag about four girls, keeping them from ever seeing the inside of brothel.

Maiti Nepal also visits areas of need to educate families about sex trafficking, so they won't be duped into selling their daughters in the first place, no matter how good the promises they hear.

Koirala seems to have all the bases covered when it comes to fighting sex trafficking in her country, and it's awesome to see her story in a mainstream news setting, to both inform and inspire people throughout the world. You can learn more about Maiti Nepal on their website, and also help them out by purchasing jewelry at Made by Survivors.

Additionally, if you're looking for a beautifully-written book that says it all about the life of a young Nepalese girl trafficked into sex slavery, I highly recommend Sold, by Patricia McCormick.

Photo credit: nromagna