All posts tagged: Nepal

Nepal’s disabled grab their chances on the pitch

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She crouches down to place her cricket bat horizontally on the ground. Carefully she tilts her head just a little to listen to the sound of the ball approaching. And then when it’s close enough she sweeps across the ground and hits the ball. Sunita Ghimeri from the first blind women’s cricket team proves that cricket is not a sport reserved for men with good eyesight only. In Kathmandu Sunita and her team of visually impaired girls fight against the public’s prejudice against handicapped people every day, by playing cricket. “I’m playing for the B3 category. In blind cricket there are three categories. B1 means totally blind, B2 means partially blind, B3 means low vision. The score of a B1 player, is double,” Sunita explains who, even though she’s one of the best sighted players from her team, can’t actually see if she’s scored a six. “I hear the ball because of the little bell inside, but I have to find out what my score is from the score keeper on the sideline,” Sunita says. Disabled in …

Nepal’s first transgender politician on a mission

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When Bhumika Shrestha was little she loved to dress up in her mother’s clothes and wear her sister’s lipstick. Her parents did not see a problem in their son wanting to dress-up. He was just a little kid after all. But Bhumika, then called Kailash, didn’t grow out of it. When she became a teenager she knew for sure that she didn’t want to be a boy anymore, but a lady. “My family gave me a boy’s name, Kailash. I didn’t like it because when I grew up my feelings and my way of thinking was totally a woman. I didn’t know why, but I felt like a girl,” says Bhumika Shrestha. Identity Last year the Nepalese government announced it would be the first country to include a third gender in its national census. It was a landmark announcement that citizens no longer had to conform to either the male or female box on the questionnaire. But unfortunately, to date this census has not resulted in a clear count of transgender people in Nepal. The Blue …