Swastika Tamang is a senior student at Shree Surya Primary School who studies at Grade-5. She is the youngest in the family of 6, with an elder sister and 2 elder brothers and is raised with much love. According to her teachers, she is a very bright child and is well-disciplined who loves to come to school every day. As the new school building is almost ready and the kids will be back to their permanent classrooms in no time, Swastika expresses her confused state of mind whether to be happy or sad seeing the construction complete.
She shares her family’s day to day life activities saying that her eldest brother has migrated to Gulf to earn and support the family while the other is studying at 8th standard. She is sad mentioning about her sister as she recently eloped as a teenager and doesn’t want to follow the same path as her sister. She says she wants to study hard and become a nurse so that when any disaster happens in the near future, she will be able to take care of her family and the injured ones in her community. Her father works at Kathmandu and comes home every weekend bringing eatables to the family. However, she also mentions that when in a state of excess alcohol, he gets unconscious and even ends up beating her mum.
The community of Tamang in Nepal is amongst the highest rated tribals where girl trafficking and eloping rates are high. They have a traditional culture of making local alcohol at home which is one of the root causes of domestic violence. The men folks are seen investing more money into consuming alcohol than in some other livelihood supporting activities. Swastika also adds up that she wants to grow up fast and become a social worker, so that she can spread the message of love and respect for women in the community and talk about the bad consequences of excess alcohol in a human’s body as well as in the community.
As Swastika looks on at the construction of her new school building, she is happy that they will soon be back to their permanent and safer school and will no longer need to share classroom as in the TLC. But as she is already in Grade-5, she is also sad at the same time as she and her other classmates will have to leave the school soon and get enrolled to another school for higher studies. She says “I love the school. How nice it would have been if we had higher classes at Shree Surya so that we could spend some more years here”. She is sad that she will get to experience studying in the new building just for some few months.
When we go to the rural domains of Nepal, we can witness many girls like Swastika who has learned the good ways of life through education. But there is still much to be done on our part in creating awareness and developing positive attitude among the disadvantaged sections starting right from the little ones so that we will not be at the risk of losing a generation of young and energetic minds!
