Sunita Basnet

Age 22
Home Country: Nepal

The first time I met Sunita Basnet, she was calmly picking a cockroaches’ carcass off the floor as girls around her shrieked and fled for higher places. The offending insect had appeared moments before, dissolving a room full of young women—otherwise rational and capable beings—into near-hysterics, as only the enlarged, winged, Bangladeshi breed of cockroach can do. Without a moment’s hesitation, Sunita had walked right up to the bug and with a loud crunch, squelched it beneath her sandal. She proceeded to scoop up the juicy remains and saunter past us, waving crushed tentacles in front of our faces with the a smirk as we crowded out of her way. Her look said it all. “You bunch of city girls,” she seemed to be saying, “This is nothing.”

Sunita grew up in a remote village of about five hundred people in the Tarai area of Nepal, north of the capital. She is the eldest of five sisters and one brother; she and her five siblings live with their parents and grandmother in one house. Although no longer working, her father used to support his large family as a farmer. They live on a small plot of land that yields just enough crops to feed the nine of them. Sunita’s mother had very little schooling as a child, but Sunita and her father taught her to read and write well enough to understand most newspaper articles and sign her name. Sunita’s mother is far from atypical; most people in the village, especially the girls, are poorly educated, proof of Nepal’s struggling education system. The boys in Sunita’s village generally fare only slightly better than the girls, financial necessity forcing most to abandon their studies and work in the fields alongside their fathers. A 2001 census found that just 48% of the total population had achieved literacy: 62% of Nepalese men and 34% of Nepalese women.

Sunita’s father, however, has always valued the importance of education. On the first day of kindergarten for example, when Sunita was in the throes of a temper tantrum and refusing to leave the house, he persuaded her to go by promising that at this particular school, teachers always gave their students chocolate. With such a prize on the horizon, the usually headstrong Sunita was easily pacified. Dressed in her best, she struck out for the school, only to lose her balance and slip and fall in the mud. Her chalkboard and chalk, assigned to all school children in lieu of scarce pencil and paper, were ruined, and so was her dress. The day just went downhill from there. She arrived late with shattered pieces of chalk in hand and mud caking her front. The school lacked facilities like walls and benches so the children sat on the floor to learn their ABC’s, but Sunita’s father had already taught her the alphabet and she could only focus on one thing: chocolate. She began to demand the teachers for what she felt was rightfully hers. One teacher finally lost patience with her insistent questioning and slapped her. Indignant, Sunita hid her chalkboard under her skirt and feigned a trip to the toilets, (a nearby pond), before running the entire distance home. Even at five, Sunita knew how to stand her ground.

Luckily, she came back. In 2004, Sunita was the first girl in her village to graduate from grade twelve. Not one to be cowed by harsh odds, social norms, or even the continual injustice of the chocolate missing from her life, Sunita’s mind quickly moved to the next challenge—raising the money to go to college. She longed to earn a degree in business management, but the program, recently introduced into the local university, was very expensive. Many in her village protested she had already achieved enough, but Sunita’s father was proud of his eldest and encouraged her dreams. Despite his own lack of resources, he assured her he would find the money for her education. So he went to Sunita’s uncle Raju, a wealthy man in the village who sponsored and supervised all the villagers’ loans, and implored him to give the family a loan. Raju refused; Sunita’s education was useless, he said. Her only value would lie in her ability to find a husband and rear his children. Raju declared he would happily lend the family money in the event of Sunita’s marriage, but never for her degree.

When her father returned in the evening, deflated and quiet, Sunita was too overcome with anticipation to see the warning signs, and asked her father eagerly, “like a small child,” for the news. At first she thought her father was joking when he explained Raju’s decision and pleaded with him to be serious: this was too grave a matter for humor. When he finally convinced her, she cried for the rest of the night. “Why God does such kind of behavior with us?” she questioned. “He gives me good, kind, understand[ing], and helpful father but He never gives us money to fulfill our basic needs. We only want to fulfill our basic needs. Uncle’s small decision made our family so sad.”

By the next morning, however, Sunita was firm in her resolve. She would find a job and pay her own way through university. With the help of a friend, she discovered an opening at a human rights journalism forum. Despite lacking experience and a degree, she interviewed with the head of the organization to inform him frankly about her situation. He spoke with the rest of the staff and decided to make an exception for Sunita, or at the very least satisfy her with the knowledge he had done all he could. The forum offered her a trial of ten days in a nearby village, to observe how she handled individuals suffering from human rights violations and how she communicated their cases to the outside world. Sunita admits to being very nervous at the prospect of interviewing the villagers: “I haven’t talked to anyone before like that,” she confessed. It took ten days to gather information and transcribe the details of one case into an article, but it was well worth the effort. With pride, she alludes to the organization’s surprise about her final work: “They had never thought that I would write that kind of article.” The organization quickly offered her the job. With a beaming smile, she recalls her happiness: “Now I am journalist!”

Well, not quite. First she had to tell her parents. The position entailed leaving home to travel around the country to meet underprivileged villagers from a variety of backgrounds, bound by their experience as victims of human rights violations. It was not exactly a job that Nepali mothers coveted for their daughters. Indeed, Sunita’s mother initially refused to let her go, citing danger and a pervasive social stigma. She was appalled at the idea of a young girl living on her own away from home, and warned Sunita that their community would assume the worst of her. As Sunita points out rather tactfully, “No girl[s] leave the home.” It was only through the continued efforts of her father that Sunita was finally able to leave a week later with her mother’s dubious blessings.

Sunita thus spent the next three years traveling the countryside and documenting the trials of her fellow Nepalese. Although she began working for free as a volunteer, she was soon promoted to a salary of 2,500 Nepalese rupees—approximately thirty-seven U.S. dollars—a month. At that time, “It was a very big amount for me,” she says. By the end of the three years, Sunita’s pay had increased to 5,000 rupees every month. But the more suffering she saw, the more she traveled through her country encountering people who could only afford to eat once a day, and who very often failed to find the money for even that one meal, the more she came to dismiss the importance of money. She realized how fortunate she was and began to discover that life’s real value was not rooted in simply becoming educated, earning money, and living a life of relative comfort—it was earned through helping those in need. Sunita asserts that she was “mentally changed” by the experience, realizing “I should not work for money one day.” Instead, she hoped to devote her time and energy to social work in the future. She cherished the human-rights job not only for the tactical reporting skills she acquired but for the perspective as well.

It is an unyielding fact that money is a universal human necessity, however, and Sunita, though spiritually transformed, was not exempt—at least not yet. Even after three years of working, Sunita’s savings didn’t even approach the university’s expensive tuition. So when she heard of a job opening for a human rights defender at an NGO called Informal Service Sector Center (INSEC), she pounced at the opportunity. Her competition was fierce: a pool of three hundred candidates, the majority of whom had already earned both their bachelor’s and master’s degrees. But as she notes, her face ablaze with intensity, “If I didn’t try, how would I have any success?” Though she had still completed only the twelfth grade, Sunita talked her way through the interview process, impressing her future employers so much with the wisdom she had gained from her travels that they offered her the job.

INSEC was responsible for two Village Development Councils that sought to represent the Mirgouliya and Harricha regions. Sunita’s village was located in the first council’s district. She was assigned the difficult task of meeting with political leaders to convince them that the addition of a constitutional assembly to the village’s political process was not only important, but it was imperative. The democratization of an entire village’s political structure was no small undertaking. Only after much discussion, in which she used her extensive communication skills from her stint in journalism, did Sunita convince both leaders and villagers alike. Before the introduction of a representative body, Sunita’s village sustained only a shell of the democratic political process, unchecked corruption circumventing any vestige of real representation. “People will vote for [a] political party if they get something like a sack full of rice, [or] five hundred rupees,” Sunita explains. “But they don’t know…five hundred rupees is only for two or three days. If you choose a bad leader it will effect [your] whole lifetime.” Sunita’s work in conjunction with INSEC granted the people in her village real agency, an invaluable gift for those whose voices had been lost in the struggle to stay above the poverty line.

Sunita next turned her attention to the project that was, unsurprisingly, the closest to her heart. It went back to her high school days. After graduating from grade eleven, already the most educated person in her village, Sunita and a few friends began to grapple with ways they could make a difference. After listening to a radio program about HIV/AIDS supported by the Saroj Koirala Memorial Foundation, they were inspired to start a club aimed at raising awareness about the pandemic, but with little funding the program was “not as useful as we thought.” That was when Rekha, a woman in Sunita’s village who was the next best educated after Sunita by virtue of having passed class ten, approached Sunita with an idea. Sunita recalls Rekha telling her, “‘If you try [this], I think everyone will follow you.’”

Along with Rekha and eight other women who were eager to get involved, Sunita established an organization called “Women Saving Club.” Its initiative was to grant loans to women in the village struggling to begin their own farming businesses, send their children to school, or earn their bachelor’s degrees. No men were allowed to join. A budding micro-financier, Sunita designed the program with one crucial provision: women could pay back their loans with limited interest rates. Members were granted six months to pay back their loans in monthly increments at a 2% interest rate, while women in the village who weren’t members could still take out a loan but at a slightly higher 3% interest rate. For such a venture, Sunita found herself seeking out capital, the essence of the materiality she would later come to question.

It began with donations of fifteen rupees from each of the ten founders every month, approximately $0.23 U.S. cents. The first month the money was used to buy pens and ledgers for keeping records. The second, third, and fourth months the money was set-aside in savings. At the six-month mark, they increased the monthly donations to twenty rupees. The first few loans they gave were for sums of five hundred rupees, about $7.50 U.S. dollars. These loans were faithfully paid back in full; with the interest, in fact, they were doubled. This capital was transformed into bigger loans that in turn yielded more interest. And just like that, a microfinance organization was born. Over the next few years, “Women Saving Club” would dole out loans for an astonishing 20,000 rupees, and eventually, every woman in the village would join. Six years later, with the organization thriving in her village while she studies at the Access Academy for the Asian University for Women, 22-year-old Sunita can now say with pride: “In every home there is one member.”

And so it happened that one uncle with gender perspectives mired firmly in the past, set into motion the steps that would launch one determined girl far into her future. With these projects, Sunita did for others what her uncle refused to do to for her. While facing down a society that told her she was worth no more than the children she could bear, a view that had wrestled its way into her very family, Sunita would begin a quest to record her country’s injustices, battle political leaders, and empower the women of her village. In doing so, Sunita would prove to her community, and perhaps a little to herself,that men are not always the arbiters of female destiny.

Small wonder one Bangladeshi cockroach didn’t faze Miss Sunita Basnet.