Parbati dropped out of her school after class three to support her mother in the household chores as often happens to a girl from a poor Nepali family. And at the age of 14, she was married off to a man she had never met before. By 16, she was already a mother of a lovely girl. “Life was difficult, but I was still a happy person.”
But then tragedy hit her like a powerful thunderbolt: Just 17 days after the birth of her daughter, her husband died in an accident.
People like Parbati Bishwokarma, Bhawana Tamang and many others who work hard and keep their faith alive in the face of great adversity are the real heroes of our society. It’s they who make all the difference and bring change in the society in the long run.
Still a mother recovering from the delivery, she turned to her parents for help as she had no other support system. Not that they didn’t have their own difficulties, still they welcomed their daughter and the granddaughter wholeheartedly. Without land of his own or any other means of income, Parbati’s father worked hard to earn two meals for the family of five.
As if she already didn’t have enough tragedies in life, her father passed away a year later. “It was a sudden death. He had slept after a meal in the evening, but didn’t wake up the next morning.” Her mother was too ill to do any physical labor and her five-year-old sister was too young for that. The responsibility of raising the family of four then fell on her shoulder. “I said to myself, there was no way I could meet this challenge and I completely lost hope in myself. So I quietly decided that I would mix poison in our meal and kill the whole family so that we would not have to face the hardship and the humiliation.”
But she could never muster enough courage to actually do so. After all, it’s not easy to take at once the life of a woman who gave birth to you and of a child who you have given birth to. “At the end, I chose to face the hardship in life.”
Perhaps life softens its cruelty once you show the resolve to face it. One fine morning, district secretary of Federation of Community Forestry Users Group, Krishna Lama, came to her and asked whether she wanted to go for a week-long training on community forestry. “I think he was trying to do me a favor out of pity so that I would get some money as a training allowance.”
But she had no idea what training meant—she had not even participated in any public meeting till then. “I was so scared even with the idea of being in a room with so many other people.”
At the same time, she also didn’t want to miss the allowance that would earn a few days’ meal for her family. Finally, she gathered enough courage to participate in the training. “I still remember how difficult it was even to introduce myself in the training hall; it was like lifting a mountain.”
More training opportunities followed, and she gradually learnt the art of communication. “I quickly figured out that you have to speak truthfully and speak only things that you know about and people will listen to you.”
A turning point came in her life when she was invited to take part in a community mediation training program. At the end of the training, she was selected as one of the best trainees and was given a certificate of a community mediator. “I returned to my village self-assured that given an opportunity I can do something; that I can make a difference.”
Later on, in 2003, community mediation program was announced in her village and she was selected to be the coordinator of the program. In the last six years, she has mediated about 200 community conflicts and 195 of them have ended in mutual agreements.
Her sphere of social activities is also growing rapidly. During Nepal’s first ever Constituent Assembly elections held in 2008, April, she was actively involved in mobilizing women. In March 2008, Sarlahi district organized one of the largest women’s rally and a mass meeting in which over 10 thousand women participated. Parbati was one of the key organizers and the master of ceremony of the meeting. “Today, I feel that given an opportunity I can do anything. Actually, anyone can do anything.”
Parbati’s personal life and her social standing have also changed dramatically in the last few years. Following a rigorous treatment, her mother’s health is getting better; her younger sister is studying in class 12 while her daughter is in class five. From a hapless widow and a member of an “untouchable” and a poor family, now she has become a respected community mediator in the village. For many poor families, she is a role model.
People like Parbati, Bhawana and many others who work hard and keep their faith alive in the face of great adversity are the real heroes of our society. It’s they who make all the difference and bring change in the society in the long run.
Their hard work and their perseverance should also make us— the more fortunate ones— think about our lives and our privileges. So many things that we take for granted are often the luxuries that majority of Nepalis can only think of. And still we make complaints, we grumble, we grow cynical and at the end make our own lives miserable. Someone rightly said that life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you react to it.
ameetdhakal@gmail.com
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