Pia Rai was 13 when she started taking drugs with her friends during lessons, unnoticed by her teacher who was struggling with a class of 75 students in an impoverished inner-city school.
She had been introduced to heroin by classmates in Dharan, a city of 120,000 people in the foothills of the Mahabharat mountains in eastern Nepal, after starting smoking and then moving onto cannabis.
“What made it so simple for me to get into drugs was my family not being that aware,” Pia said.
“My classroom was so big that the teacher could not pay attention to all the children, so the kids on the back benches could take drugs in class and the teacher wouldn’t even know about it,” she added
Pia, now 17, was one of the lucky ones. She received help from a dependence treatment center and is catching up with her lost schooling and working as a “peer educator” to warn others of the dangers of drugs.
Police in Dharan estimate that around half of the city’s youth are drug users, part of an emerging “urban poor” often overlooked by aid agencies and government -ministries focusing the fight against poverty in the countryside.
Hundreds of thousands of children like Pia are growing up in Nepal’s towns and cities unable to access basic services on their doorsteps, UNICEF said in a report launched this week.
“When people think of poverty, they tend to focus on a child in a remote rural village,” UNICEF Nepal representative Hanaa Singer said.
“But today, an increasing number of children living in urban centers are among the most disadvantaged and vulnerable in the world,” she added. “They live tantalizingly close to essential, basic services but are deprived of most of them.”
More than half of Nepal’s urban under-fives are not registered at birth, meaning they have no official name, identity or nationality and little access to services provided by the state, or protection under the law.
Life in city slums is particularly hazardous in Kathmandu, where there are regular outbreaks of diarrhea and cholera in the thousands of shanties on the banks of the Bagmati River, which is used as a dump for toxic industrial and hospital waste.
At the last count in 2004, Nepal had about 5,000 street children, although the number is believed to have grown fast since then.
About half have been sexually abused, while up to 30 percent are HIV positive and 40 percent are drug-users, according to UNICEF.
Many are engaged in “the worst forms of child labor,” UNICEF says, including garbage collection, begging and loading trucks.
Niraj Malla, 12, works in a plant nursery, packing soil into bags for 200 rupees (US$2.50) a day in Biratnagar, a city on the border with India.
He is a member of a UNICEF-backed “working children’s club” which gives youngsters the opportunity to get together to discuss work-related problems and learn about their rights.
He told journalists at the launch of the UNICEF report in Kathmandu on Monday of children he knew who were made to work so hard washing dishes that “the flesh was rotting from their hands.”
“You don’t have to go to the villages ... to find poverty or deprivation,” he said. “You can find it right in the city, in the little hut beside the big mansion.”
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of
A prominent Christian leader has allegedly been stabbed at the altar during a Mass yesterday in southwest Sydney. Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was saying Mass at Christ The Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley just after 7pm when a man approached him at the altar and allegedly stabbed toward his head multiple times. A live stream of the Mass shows the congregation swarm forward toward Emmanuel before it was cut off. The church leader gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, amassing a large online following, Officers attached to Fairfield City police area command attended a location on Welcome Street, Wakeley following reports a number