A woman in blue kurta-salwar waited desperately for her turn to talk to a government official in a room at the Department of Foreign Employment (DoFE). While waiting, she continued to fold and unfold a sheet of paper with a gloomy look on her face.

She kept trying to tell the official, “Please have a look at this paper."  Before Binita Gurung could explain her troubles to the official and the latter could look at her papers and offer any help, a long queue had already formed, with everyone holding a travel document or an insurance document or a passport or all of these.

Gurung shrugged and sat back in a sofa in the corner of the room. From her gestures, one could easily guess that she was going through some intense quandary. She took out another piece of wrinkled paper from her bag and looked up at the faces of total strangers, obviously expecting them to help.

The piece of paper contained two phone numbers in Saudi Arabia. A man in the same room spoke to her for a while and dialed one of the numbers. He then started talking on the phone in Arabic.

“Don´t worry, the boss sounded nice on the phone,” he told Gurung, adding, “He said your brother was hospitalized for the last two months and died 10 days ago.”

Laxmi Tamang, Binita´s sister-in-law, wasn´t ready to believe what her husband´s boss had said. “We had our last telephone contact two months ago and since then his mobile has been off;" she said. Her large gold earrings swaying, she added, “The boss must have lied. Else, why didn´t my husband called me for more than two months or why couldn´t we reach him on his cell phone?”

San Singh Tamang had gone back to Saudi Arabia in April, 2013 to work for the same company as before as a welder/steel fixer. He had gone to Saudi Arabia for the first time in 2009.

He last contacted his family on January 31, 2013. Tamang, who hailed from Dolakha district, was the father of a son and two daughters.

 Relatives bringing the body of Nepali workers who died in Qarter, at Kathmandu airport in this July 18, 2009 photo. ( BijayRai/ Republica)

Binita Gurung told Republica that they came to know about her brother´s death through a friend in Saudi Arabia just three days ago. As per the friend, her brother died two months ago and his body in a hospital morgue, adds Binita. The family is in the process of trying to bring San Singh Tamang´s body back to Kathmandu.

The case is just the very tip of the proverbial iceberg. As per information received from DoFE, three bodies of Nepali workers who die in the Gulf are sent back to Nepal every day.

DoFE spokesperson Badri Kumar Karki said, “The process of bringing a dead body from Saudi Arabia, with its stringent laws, is somewhat complex compared to other Gulf countries.”

Karki said they have known people waiting for six months to bring their dead from Saudi Arabia. “The employer of San Singh Tamang should provide an exit permit for the body,” informed Gyan Nath Dhakal, section officer at DoFE.

Every day thousands of people flock DoFE to take work or re-entry permits for some to foreign country, mostly in the Gulf.

The British newspaper Guardian wrote recently, “This summer (2013), Nepalese workers died at a rate of almost one a day in Qatar, many of them young men who had sudden heart attacks." The paper went on to say that thousands of Nepalese face exploitation and abuses that amount to modern-day slavery.

Published on: 12 April 2014 | Republica