The Village Where the Girls Disappeared | Crossroads Around the World

There was a village in Nepal without any girls. My name is Jeevan Rana Magar, and I am the CEO of 514. When you go into these remote villages, specifically in Nepal, most of these people are farmers. They don't have major cash crop income, and because they're so poor that they have been selling their daughters and just promoting exploitation. 514 goes and develops the tourism industry in the villages and brings tourism income to replace the income of the exploitation right at the source. Each tourist coming to Nepal produces three to five jobs of revenue. Tourism is like a tide that lifts all the boats, because wherever the tourism goes into these remote areas, it is just not bringing the income, but it is actually developing the whole village holistically, and it's just an amazing transformation that happens in the village. So, when you talk about trafficking, specifically in Nepal, a lot of the organizations are trying to stop this. It's just not 514. No one was going where the girls were coming from. And you're talking about very remote and very isolated places. And we were like, we want to stop it right there. And so that is why we say we want to prevent, and that is what we do. 2011, when we were doing research about where most of the girls were getting sold from, we found an article and basically talked about a village straight north from the capital, Kathmandu. No one is allowed to go. If you want to go to this village, then you're going there to die. We prayed about it and asked the Lord, and we must at least try. And so we went inside the village. And when I was there, I could not see any girls in between 5 to 40. A generation of girls had been sold into prostitution. The local people actually loved us. Traffickers didn't like us because we were a threat to them, but local people, they loved

us. The major causes of trafficking is poverty. They don't have an alternative to income. The other one is education, and then the other one is a worldview. What 514 believes is when we're taking a tourism and addressing these three major causes, the trafficking automatically goes away because they have an alternative income instead of exploitation. Once we knew that the people were receiving us, we said we want to develop this whole area as a tourism destination. And so we started scouting out the places where we can build new trails. We selected the families that wanted to host the tourists and built homestays like Airbnb type. We taught them how to cook, how to make beds, how to clean the bathrooms. And we started taking tourists as much as we could. And we focused on that specific village, just one village, for 10 years. We have found a big change in the village. After years of prevention, there were finally girls again. Now we are seeing marriages and new babies. The village that we have been working for the last 12 years has been declared as a trafficking-free zone, and we want that to go to the whole nation. That would be our success. So when you know about trafficking, you know that these girls are getting sold. If you don't do anything, then who will? And so I think you coming to Nepal, it's just not you enjoying the country, but you're also stopping trafficking, not just for a year or two. You're talking about generations. Because when you talk about trafficking, it just sounds so impossible to address and end this. But we know that we can end this. And we have seen it.

We have seen it with eyes, and we have witnessed it. And we can't wait for more to happen in the new places that we're going. Nepal needs you. These girls need you.