Excerpts from:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/12/21/world/asia/ap-as-nepal-migrant-deaths.html?_r=0
Hundreds of young Nepali men excitedly wave final goodbyes to friends and family. On this day 1,500 will fly out of the Kathmandu airport bound for jobs mostly in Malaysia, Qatar or Saudi Arabia — jobs that are urgently needed by the people of this desperately poor country.
But on this day, too, six young men will come back in wooden caskets, rolled like suitcases out of baggage claim on luggage carts.
The number of Nepali workers going abroad has more than doubled since the country began promoting foreign labor in recent years: from about 220,000 in 2008 to about 500,000 in 2015. Yet the number of deaths among those workers has risen much faster in the same period. One out of every 2,500 workers died in 2008; last year one out of every 500 died, according to an Associated Press analysis of data released by Nepal's Ministry of Labour and Employment.
In total, over 5,000 workers from this small country have died working abroad since 2008— more than the number of U.S. troops killed in the Iraq War.
The causes, in many cases, have been mysterious. Natural death, heart attack or cardiac arrest are listed for nearly half the deaths. Most families are notified that their loved ones simply went to bed and never woke up. That's exactly what Saro was told.
Nepal exports iron and steel, carpets, some vegetables — but mainly, Nepal exports men. It even advertises them.
"Nepalese workers are well known for their hard work, dedication and loyalty," boasts the Nepalese Embassy website in Doha, Qatar, where a pre-World Cup construction boom employs about 1.5 million migrants. The Nepali workers "are comparatively cost effective," says the embassy, and they're experienced at "working in the extreme climatic conditions."
About 10 percent of Nepal's 28 million residents are working abroad. They send back more than $6 billion a year, amounting to about 30 percent of the country's annual revenues. Only Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are more dependent on foreign earnings.
Sitting behind her tidy desk at the Department of Foreign Employment, spokeswoman Rama Bhattarai shrugs off the death toll.
"I'm not trying to be insensitive but we have sent millions of workers to more than 100 countries, and so yes, sometimes people will die. They die as foreign employees, they die here when a bus goes off a cliff," she says.
Authorities in Nepal say their citizens seem to die abroad more frequently than their equally vulnerable Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi and Indonesian co-workers, but the explanation for the increased mortality has been unclear.
"It's usually sleeping disease," said Kumud Khanal, vice president of the Nepal Association of Foreign Employment Agencies, which represents more than 400 registered agents. "We get the report that he was talking with friends in the evening, had dinner and went to bed, and in the morning he was found dead." The deaths are reported as a hypertension problem, he said, like heart attack or cardiac arrest.
Abroad, Nepali workers also eat twice a day, but the mainstay is whole meal flour flatbread with some pickle or a vegetable, and once a day they have chicken. Some in the Middle East say they drink less water at their desert worksites than they do in mountainous Nepal because, as Hindus, they're not allowed to use Muslim bathrooms and are forced to wait for hours.
No one has identified a single cause of SUNDS fatalities — medical journal discussions include genetics, infection and nutritional deficiencies. And in Nepal, the syndrome is not being considered at this point. Instead, Nepali authorities say it could be stress, even homesickness, brought on by physically demanding jobs in extremely hot climates.
This week Saro made the daylong journey back to Kathmandu, calmer and determined.
She spent two days at a government office. Clerks ignored her, then a date on the death certificate was deemed unacceptable. Eventually, with help, she received $2,777 from the Foreign Employment Promotion Board.
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