(Part 1/2) “I have always fought for my rights. I could see that as a daughter I was treated differently. My fight started with my father. He declined to send me to school. ‘What purpose does it serve sending a daughter to school?’, he would argue. For him, the school was no place for a girl. For him, it was important that I worked at home, go to the woods, and take care of the babies and animals of the house. There were many fathers in these hills who identified with my father’s thinking. But I was not the kind of person who would just agree to whatever was being told to me. I insisted I go to school and that he take me. He did not so I went on my own. My father knew that I would do something of this nature so he had already instructed the schoolmaster not to admit me without his presence. So the headmaster obviously declined. These men had conspired against me. But I kept on going to the school and one day in anger I told the headmaster that I had no father so that now he was free to admit me. This reached my father and finally out of shame he put me in school. But it was only to shut me up. In his mind, this all was a joke and he felt sooner or later I will leave this and return home to help with the chore. But I did not. I kept on going to school. I kept on studying. And when I completed 5th grade and told my father about my results, he cried. He said he had done great injustice to me in denying education. He said he did not know a girl could do well like the boys. He also asked me to continue with my education.

Slowly, the villagers also started to see me differently. By the time I had completed the 8th grade I was already tutoring little kids. My days got busy and I even started earning some money. 10 rupees to tutor one a kid for an hour. Some villagers even offered 20. My father would sit on the front porch and watch me tutor the kids from the village. I remember the look of awe in his eyes. I knew he was proud of me in a way that he had never imagined. Here was his teenage daughter who instead of washing dishes and cooking was teaching kids like a schoolmaster.”

#BreakingTheSilence with Dignity Without Danger: Menstruation in Nepal