Every January, 83-year-old Olga Murray of northern California goes to southwestern Nepal for the annual Maghe Sankranti winter festival. That's where she can find impoverished Tharu farmers selling their daughters to higher caste families to work as domestic slaves.
Olga's Girls featured at Encore.org
Published March 4, 2009
A Pig or a Goat to Keep a Girl from Slavery: Olga Murray's Encore Story
By Terry Nagel
Olga Murray's remarkable encore journey story of saving Nepalese girls from being sold into slavery is reaching wider audiences, thanks to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The 83-year-old resident of Sausalito, Calif., has saved more than 4,300 young girls from being sold as domestic slaves in a most unusual way: by trading pigs or goats for their freedom.
Encore.org first wrote about Murray in July 2008, after a story about her by Meredith May in the San Francisco Chronicle. The Pulitzer Center awarded May a grant to travel to Nepal, enabling her to tell Murray's story in greater detail, in an article called "Olga's Girls," a slide show and a video. All may be viewed on SFGate.com.
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Nathalie joined the Pulitzer Center in 2006, shortly after its founding, and has played a key role in the development of the Center's model and approach towards journalism initiatives and...