For much of her childhood, Rijya believed she was an orphan.
That’s what her papers said and that’s what the Nepalese operators of her foreign-funded orphanage in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, told her.
But that narrative fell apart when the parents of other “orphans” at her privately run home started showing up at the gate demanding to see their daughters. “The caretakers would chase them away and we were told never to mention them in front of the foreign donors,” she recalls.
Eventually Rijya, who prefers to be identified by a pseudonym, learnt the truth. Both her parents were alive and she had been trafficked to Kathmandu at the age of two because her family was in financial difficulties.