Olga Murray, who changed the lives of children in Nepal, dies at 98
After a six-week trip to India in 1984, Olga Murray flew to Nepal to hike remote villages in the Himalayas.
There, Ms. Murray, an adventurous 59-year-old lawyer, encountered beautiful landscapes and friendly people. But it was the children she met while trekking along rugged mountain trails from Pokhara to Siklis that enchanted her and changed her life.
“They were poorer than I had ever experienced – dirty, dressed in ragged clothes, malnourished, without any toys,” she wrote in her autobiography, “Olga’s Promise: One Woman’s Commitment to the Children of Nepal” (2015, with Mary Sutro Callender ). ‘And yet they were the most cheerful, funny and lovable little children anywhere in the world. Their fondest wish was to one day go to school.”
One evening she was invited to a hut, where she met three children whose fathers said they were lucky to be educated – even though they had to walk two hours up and down the mountain to school. When she saw the children sitting on the floor of their hut doing their homework by candlelight, she had an epiphany.
“I suddenly knew – out of the blue, in a lightning moment – what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” she wrote. “At that moment, I promised myself that I would find a way to educate Nepali children.”
Mrs. Murray dedicated her next 40 years to thousands of Nepalese children. She started on her next visit in 1985, providing $1,200 in scholarships to four orphaned boys.
She then created a social safety net through the Nepal Youth Foundation, which she co-founded in 1989, including building feeding centers to alleviate famine. She also rescued thousands of girls and young women who had been sold by their fathers, often poor subsistence farmers, as indentured servants for wealthy Nepalese families.
Ms Murray, who was recognized by the Dalai Lama in 2001 as an “unsung hero of compassion,” died on February 20 at her home in Sausalito, California. She was 98 and had lived half the year in Nepal; her last visit there ended in May. The foundation announced the death.
Freeing girls as young as five who were sold for less than $100 a year – a practice called kamlari that had existed for generations among the Tharu ethnic minority in southwestern Nepal – is one of the foundation’s most significant achievements.
In 2000, the foundation began an unusual arrangement that led to the return of approximately 13,000 girls after a life of menial labor, long hours, and emotional and physical abuse as kitchen slaves: the organization brought in social workers to learn – from the parents of the girls and the middlemen who brokered the sale — where the girls worked, Som Paneru, president of the foundation, said in a telephone interview. Sometimes the police intervened to free them. The foundation also found and rescued the girls as they returned to their villages for the annual Maghe Sankranti winter festival – a requirement of their work.
To secure freedom for the girls – also called kamlaris – the foundation offered the families something simple: piglets or goats that after a year they could sell to make at least as much money as if they had sold their daughters. The families could also keep the animals to breed and slaughter for income. The foundation also guaranteed that the girls would receive education.
“We brought back 37 girls in 2000 and provided them with school uniforms, clothes, meals and books,” said Mr Paneru, one of Ms Murray’s scholarship recipients. The number of rescued girls increased exponentially every year, he said.
The foundation subsequently sued in Nepal’s Supreme Court to ban contract labor as a violation of the country’s labor laws; it was declared illegal in 2006, but there was little enforcement until 2013.
“We have turned the community against this practice,” Ms. Murray said in a 2014 video on the foundation’s website. “It is not only this generation of girls, but also their daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters who will be saved from this terrible practice.”
Many of the rescued kamlaris became outspoken opponents of indentured labor as a result of the war Empowerment of the Freed Kamlaris Programwhich grew into a network of cooperatives with credit groups, micro-lending opportunities and shared livestock.
Olga Davidovits was born on June 1, 1925, in Satu Mare, Romania, and emigrated to the Bronx at the age of six, with her mother, Matilda (Herskovits) Davis, a seamstress, and her three sisters. They joined her father, Joseph Davidovits, a furniture maker whose last name was changed to Davis when he arrived at Ellis Island in 1927.
After graduating from high school in 1942, Olga traveled around the United States for three years before enrolling at Columbia University. She transferred after a year to Ohio University in Athens, but returned to Columbia, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in government in 1949.
After graduating, she was turned down for a job at the U.S. State Department because, according to a classmate who worked there, she was born behind the Iron Curtain and still had family there, making her the victim of blackmail.
She was soon hired by political columnist Drew Pearson to answer readers’ mail. She worked for him while attending George Washington University Law School, graduating in 1954.
During her second year of law school, she met Judd Murray, who ran his own advertising agency; they married in 1955. They divorced six years later but remained friends until his death in 1976, her grandson Sean Murray said. She is survived by her stepsons, Patrick and Steve Murray; another grandson; and four great-grandchildren.
Knowing that a woman in her day would be unlikely to get a job in a law firm, Mrs. Murray was hired in 1955 as an investigative attorney or law clerk at the California Supreme Court in San Francisco. She spent the next 37 years clerking for two judges until retiring in 1992 to focus on the foundation full-time.
By then, she and Allan Aistrope, a volunteer English teacher at an orphanage in Nepal, had begun building an organization operating on a shoestring budget. In 1989, they founded what was then called the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation, with Ms. Murray as president and chief fundraiser. Mr Aistrope left in 2000 due to a dispute.
Over the years, the foundation has built 17 nutritional rehabilitation clinics; the Olgapuri Children’s Village, which can accommodate 80 children whose parents cannot support them; a counseling center for children affected by trauma and loss; and a vocational school.
Freeing the enslaved girls resonated deeply with Mrs. Murray. On January 15, 2014, which was declared Kamlari Freedom Day by the Nepalese government, she attended a parade in Dang district.
“Som and I watched as hundreds of liberated girls marched in their long dresses, chanting slogans and raising their fists in the air,” she wrote in her autobiography. “It took me back to the first demonstration I participated in, when there were thousands of girls still in custody.”
She added: “As we stood on the sidelines, a few girls gestured for me to join the march, so I walked with them – for the last time.”