Arati Rawal, 27, travelled for a week to reach the Nepal border from Delhi on 21 May. But the border was sealed and the Indian police sent her to a quarantine centre in Paliya.
She was so desperate to get home, she fled and sneaked into Nepal walking 12 hours through paths in the jungle.
“I was so happy to be in Nepal, but that happiness did not last long,” said Arati, who was taken by Nepal Police to a female only quarantine centre in Dhangadi. “there are women police in the daytime, but at night there are male police and we never go out.”
Arati looks frail from her ordeal of hitch-hiking through India and walking across the border. But she is also stressed because back home her neighbours have spread rumours that she has come back with coronavirus and have ostracised her family.
Lying on the floor next to Arati is Sarala Rathor who has a two-year-old baby and was on her way to her parent’s home in Nepal when the lockdown sealed the border. She did finally enter Nepal but has been kept in the detention centre.
“It is difficult here,” she sighs. “We get to eat a simple meal only at 2pm, it is not enough for me and I have stopped lactating so the baby is always hungry.”
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Both Arati and Sarala understand that the authorities have created a separate quarantine for women returnees, but say there is nothing here that women need. There are no sanitary pads available, and some women have run out of contraceptive pills.
The night-time patrols by police instead of being reassuring frightens the women in the quarantine, and they say it feels more like a concentration camp. The quarantine centre is a converted college building and has 12 women and three children. It is one of 30 quarantine centres in Dhangadi Municpality which have 688 returnees from India, 79 of them women and 19 children.
Deputy Mayor Sushila Mishra said it was difficult enough to set aside a separate quarantine for women, and she is trying to coordinate with the police to have women guards at night . The fear among women is fanned by the fact that the perpetrators of the widely-publicised rape murder of a young student in Dhangadi has still not been resolved even after three years.
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The business community in Kailali has started handing out dignity bags for women returnees at the border with basic necessities. But the facilities in Kailali do not meet even the minimum standards in the government’s own guidelines which require quarantine centres to have medical officers, health checks every day, two main meals and two snack packets a day. They are also supposed to have an ambulance on call, adequate water and sanitation and beds at least 3m apart.
Anita Joshi, 30, also returned from India and is worried that her ten-year-old son is not eating anything. “I will probably be sick not because of the virus but because of the lack of food,” she says.
As India relaxes its lockdown and trains services restart, the number of Nepali workers returning from India has risen to 5,000 a day, and a third of them are women.
from Nepali Times https://ift.tt/2yYBKKi
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