Take me to America!

It was my second day in Nepal. Still a little bit confused in this dusty and hot city, I headed to Martin Chautari for an orientation session. The whole IFP group met for the first time in Kathmandu. Not even one hour went by when we already had the first group joke: “Take me to America.”

One of the speakers warned us that someone might offer us money in exchange for getting married. This agreement would allow them to obtain the golden ticket: the American green card.
This is not so hard to imagine. Katmandu is full of advertising billboards that invite people to study in the United States, England, Australia and many other places. One of the few avenues of the city hosts institutes that specialize in exporting Nepali youngsters. In the same place, they can prepare for the TOEFL exam and be advised by an Australian visa specialist. In this country, education and emigration are often synonymous.

Every year, this poor country spends its limited resources in training people that eventually emigrate. Apart from this economic aspect, the brain drain also means the loss of the most qualified population, the one that is most likely to be innovative and entrepreneurial.

If Nepal were a company, it would have declared bankrupt a long time ago. More than half of the investment in development comes from foreign aid and its rate of unemployment is 42%. It seems that the opportunities for professionals are reduced to finding a job in the government or working at an international NGO.

Of course, another path to salvation is emigrating. According to a NIDS report, every day around 560 Nepalese fly out of Nepal for foreign employment. I wonder how viable is to think of development when a country is not attractive even for its own inhabitants. But the truth is that emigration seems to be a solution both for those who leave and for those who stay.

As the solitary man who eagerly waits for his pension in Gabriel García Márquez’s “No One Writes to the Colonel,” millions of Nepali people wait for the remittances periodically sent by their relatives. The country is among the world’s top 10 remittance recipients, also according to the NIDS report.

Here, a recruitment agency is not a company that finds a secretary for a multinational company. It is a firm that specializes in sending Nepalese abroad to do menial jobs. On its website, Pioneer Overseas proudly announces that they “are engaged in supplying human resources to various parts of the world”, without a word about human resources for Nepali firms.