ASIA / PACIFIC
Page 4 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
January 2, 2017
Increasingly, Nepalis working abroad go home in coffins
By Martha Mendoza
The Associated Press
ATHMANDU, Nepal — A tiny
young woman crouches just
outside the airport, crying softly
into her thin shawl. It’s cold, but her
sleeping toddler is warm in her arms.
Travellers swarm around — Himalayan
trekkers load up expedition backpacks. A
Chinese tour group boards a bus. A dozen
flight attendants in crisp blue suits and
heels click by.
Saro Kumari Mandal, 26, covers her
head completely, a bundle of grief.
Hundreds of young Nepali men wave
goodbyes. On this day, 1,500 fly out of the
Kathmandu airport for desperately
needed jobs, mostly in Malaysia, Qatar, or
Saudi Arabia. But on this day, too, six
come back in wooden caskets, rolled out of
baggage claim on luggage carts.
Scrawled in black marker on one:
“Human Remains, Balkisun Mandal
Khatwe.” Saro’s husband.
The number of Nepali workers going
abroad more than doubled after the
country began promoting foreign labor in
recent years: from about 220,000 in 2008 to
about 500,000 in 2015. The number of
deaths among those workers has risen
much faster. One out of every 2,500
workers died in 2008; last year, one out of
every 500 died, according to an Associated
Press analysis of data released by Nepal’s
Ministry of Labour and Employment.
In total, more than 5,000 workers from
the small country have died working
abroad since 2008 — more than the
number of U.S. troops killed in the Iraq
War.
The causes are often listed as natural
death, heart attack, or cardiac arrest —
the men go to bed after an exhausting day
of work and never wake up. That’s what
Saro was told happened to Balkisun.
Now medical researchers say these
deaths fit a familiar pattern: Every decade
or so, dozens, or even hundreds, of
seemingly healthy migrant Asian workers
start dying in their sleep. It happened in
the U.S. in the late 1970s, in Singapore
about a decade later, and more recently in
China. The suspected killer even has a
name: Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal
Death Syndrome.
Next year, an international consortium
is launching an investigation. For today’s
arrivals, they’re too late.
About 10 percent of Nepal’s 28 million
residents work abroad. They send back
more than $6 billion a year, 30 percent of
the country’s revenues. Only Tajikistan
and Kyrgyzstan are more dependent on
K
foreign earnings.
“Nepalese workers are well known for
their hard work, dedication, and loyalty,”
boasts the Nepalese Embassy website in
Doha, Qatar, where a construction boom
employs about 1.5 million migrants from
many countries. The “comparatively cost-
effective” Nepali workers are experienced
at “working in the extreme climatic
conditions,” says the embassy.
Nepalis build highways, stadiums, and
houses in Gulf states and guard shopping
malls, sew sweatshirts, and assemble
televisions in Malaysia. Anyone who has
bought imported sportswear or electron-
ics, or who plans to go to the 2022 World
Cup in Qatar, may be using the products of
their labor.
The migrants pay recruiters about
$1,100 for the jobs. If they’re not tricked
out of their earnings — and some are —
they can send home about $300 a month.
Department of Foreign Employment
spokeswoman Rama Bhattarai said some
deaths are inevitable: “They die as foreign
employees, they die here when a bus goes
off a cliff.”
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Balkisun’s body arrives on an 8:00pm
flight. He died in his sleep six weeks after
he left Nepal, at 26, to help build highways
as part of World Cup infrastructure im-
provements, said his Qatar-based Habtoor
Leighton Group supervisor, Ganesh
Khang Mandal.
At the airport, the casket slides easily
into a custom-welded coffin rack on one of
10 trucks Nepal’s government provides to
bring bodies back to villages.
Saro and her three-year-old son jolt
around the backseat for a precarious,
eight-hour journey home to Belhi vil-
lage.
The family is marginalized in every way:
Ethnically, they’re from the “untouchable”
caste, and they speak Maithili, a language
more common in India, a few miles south.
They live eight to a room in a
mud-and-stick home among sparse rice
paddies. A shared cellphone is passed from
house to house. Chronically hungry, they
survive on less than $1 a day.
When the truck reaches Belhi, hundreds
of women in traditional saris, men in work
clothes, and children pour into the narrow
RISKY BUSINESS. Mohammed Tohit, 28, holds
his passport in front of the solid, cement-and-plaster
home built for his family in Belhi village, Nepal. Tohit
is the envy and inspiration of the village. He worked in
Malaysia for almost six years, sewing clothes for Nike,
Lacoste, and Columbia Sportswear, saving more than
$20,000 — enough to buy the sturdy two-bedroom
house. In the bottom photo, relatives and villagers
carry the coffin of Balkisun Mandal Khatwe at Belhi
village in Saptari district, Nepal. Balkisun, who had
been working for Habtoor Leighton Group in Qatar
for less than a month, died in his sleep. (AP Photos/
Niranjan Shrestha)
dirt street, tears streaming down their
faces. Some stand on rooftops. Others
crowd a balcony.
Mohammed Tohit, 28, watches from
across the street. He is the envy and
inspiration of his neighbors: Six years of
sewing for Nike, Lacoste, and Columbia
Sportswear in Malaysia helped him buy a
sturdy, cement two-bedroom house, a
small farm, a cow, a goat, and a television
set. He’s soon leaving for Saudi Arabia.
“I am scared, sure,” he said, “but I have
no way to earn anything here.”
What causes deaths like Balkisun’s?
Medical journals associate Sudden
Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome
with genetics, infection, and nutritional
deficiencies. In Nepal, authorities say it
could be stress, a changed diet, even
homesickness, brought on by physically
demanding jobs in extremely hot
climates.
Utah State University professor Ron
Munger studied Thai migrant workers
after hundreds died in their sleep in
Singapore. He said the Nepali deaths
“sound like exactly the same thing.”
While the causes of previous strings of
deaths haven’t been pinpointed, fatalities
dropped in each case when workplace
safety, housing, and diet improved.
Cardiac
epidemiology
researcher
Nirmal Aryal at the University of Otago in
Wellington, New Zealand, recently
published “A Call for Public Health
Action” in the Asia-Pacific Journal of
Public Health about the deaths. He’s
organizing an international collaboration
to investigate.
At Balkisun’s village, his wife falls
screaming and crying onto the road and is
carried inside. About 50 men carry his
body to a river on a bamboo platform.
His young son is purified, dipped naked
in the river. He’s wrapped in white cloth.
And with his uncles’ hands guiding his
own, he takes a bundle of burning twigs
and lights his father’s funeral pyre.
Associated Press journalists Binaj Gurubacharya,
Niranjan Shrestha, and Janak Raj Sapkota in Nepal,
Eileen Ng in Malaysia, and Adam Schreck in the
United Arab Emirates contributed to this story.
Wham!’s influence felt in China after landmark 1985 concert
By Louise Watt
The Associated Press
EIJING — George Michael’s
death brought back memo-
ries in China of the heady
1980s when Wham! was the first ma-
jor western band to play in the coun-
try after the death of Mao Zedong and
decades of cultural isolation.
Many Chinese who had never even
heard of the band lined up for hours to
buy $1.75 tickets to the groundbreak-
ing April 1985 concert at the People’s
Gymnasium, the biggest stadium in
Beijing at the time.
Inside the 12,000-strong stadium,
seated spectators watched in bewil-
derment as Michael and Andrew
Ridgeley danced in big-shouldered
jackets with bleached and feathered
hair. The backing dancers’ strapless
costumes and polka-dot miniskirts
also stunned the audience in China at
a time when people still dressed in
similar shades of green and gray.
“It was the first time a western
B
band had come to China, everyone
was ready to make some noise and
stand,” said Li Ji, a restaurant owner
who went to the concert in his 20s.
“But there were so many police
officers there, people didn’t dare to.”
Wham!’s manager, Simon Napier-
Bell, spent 18 months persuading the
Chinese government to let them in
and secure their place as one of the
world’s biggest bands by telling them
it would help them attract foreign
investment.
The police warned spectators to
stay seated, worried they would be
unable to control the crowds and
there might even be riots. Some
young Chinese who got up to dance
were hauled away by security
officers.
The Wham! concert influenced Chi-
nese musicians, who had never seen
electric guitars played on stage and
began to get interested in rock ‘n’ roll.
Huang Wen, a music writer, said
the performance had an impact on
big-name musicians, including the
godfather of Chinese rock, Cui Jian.
“In the early 1980s, pop songs from
Hong Kong were very popular in
mainland China and after the con-
cert, college students and people in
the music industry started to get
interested in rock ‘n’ roll,” she said.
Li said the army department that
his parents worked for had given out
tickets as a benefit. He attended the
concert along with his parents’
colleagues and their kids.
“I remember there was a little
incident during the concert, the main
lights went out because there was a
problem with the electricity, so the
bassist danced a little break dance,”
Li said. “It was the first time people
saw that and it was so popular, people
liked it.”
State media said the concert “was a
sensation.”
While young Chinese today don’t
know the names George Michael or
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