Human trafficking is one of the most abominable crimes in human history. The traffic in persons by means of coercion and deception for commercial sex exploitation, forced labor, or slavery, is an alarming global phenomenon. It plagues a country like Nepal, where poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and the suppression of women’s rights in law and tradition, have fueled the problem. Estimates indicate that as many as ten thousand women and children are trafficked annually from Nepal to India for prostitution exploitation.

In 1996, nearly three hundred trafficked Nepali girls were rescued in a police raid in the brothels of Mumbai, India. For six months, they were kept in harsh semi-detention in Mumbai shelters since they could not be immediately repatriated. Nepal’s government refused to accept them since they were seen as “soiled” female minors, and without citizenship papers. When non-government organizations (NGOs) intervened, the girls were finally repatriated. Traumatized, stigmatized and disowned by their families, their prospects of reintegration were difficult and dim. A group of these survivors, however, bravely decided that if society and their own families had abandoned them, then they would have to take control of their lives by themselves. These fifteen survivors, ages fifteen to eighteen, banded themselves into a group they boldly called SHAKTI SAMUHA—in English, “Power Group”—with the aim of empowering trafficking survivors so that they can lead a dignified life. While the group started work right away, they could not register their organization, being minors and ‘non-citizens,’ until 2000. SHAKTI SAMUHA is the world’s first anti-trafficking NGO created and run by trafficking survivors themselves.

Surmounting difficulties with the help of partner organizations, SHAKTI SAMUHA has amazingly accomplished a great deal in helping female trafficking victims, as well as women and children at risk of being victimized. In 2004 the group established Shakti Kendra in Kathmandu, a halfway home that has since provided survivors shelter, medical care, counseling, legal aid, educational support, skills training, and start-up loans for income-generating activities. Targeting women and girls at risk, SHAKTI SAMUHA also set up an emergency shelter in Pokhara, where diverse support services are offered for street children, child laborers, and girls at risk. They have carried out awareness-raising programs in trafficking-prone districts in Kathmandu, targeting slums and establishments like dance bars, massage parlors, and carpet factories. They have also organized community-based Child Protection Committees, conducted training for groups including the police, and used such media as street theater in their campaign against trafficking and domestic violence.

Pushing the campaign to the policy level, SHAKTI SAMUHA partnered with international organizations to develop protocols for the repatriation of trafficked victims, significantly influenced the framing of Nepal’s 2007 Human Trafficking Act and the creation of an anti-trafficking unit in the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare. Represented in the National Committee to Combat Human Trafficking, they are lobbying to revise citizenship laws that are gender-discriminatory and that obstruct the reintegration of trafficked women. Now working in eleven districts, SHAKTI SAMUHA has reached fifteen thousand people in its awareness-raising activities; rehabilitated and reintegrated 678 victims of trafficking and domestic violence; and provided financial support for livelihood and education to 670 women. At the core of these achievements are the group’s founders and the five hundred trafficked women who now constitute its membership. Bonded by a common experience, they are relentless in their drive to help themselves and others like them. As one member declares, “Nowadays, I am ready to fight, to argue and debate against threats and stigmatization. We are trafficking survivors, but no less capable than others in society.”

In electing SHAKTI SAMUHA to receive the 2013 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes its founders and members for transforming their lives in service to other human trafficking survivors, for their passionate dedication towards rooting out a pernicious social evil in Nepal, and for the radiant example they have shown the world in reclaiming the human dignity that is the birthright of all abused women and children everywhere.

Namaste.

Granting the award to Shakti Samuha as the fifth awardee from Nepal is a great honor and pleasure not only for my colleagues and I but also for our partners—funding agencies, media and NGOs, the Nepalese people and the government.

We would like, therefore, to express our deepest thanks to the trustees and staff of the Foundation for working very hard to select Shakti Samuha to receive this award. It confirms that our mission to abolish human trafficking is right and should be pursued. It has been very inspiring for me to see not only Shakti Samuha grow but also to see more people get involved, stay involved, and work harder for the best interests of women and children who are the most vulnerable groups in our society. I am sure this award will facilitate our work in this very hard struggle.

Despite all our success, what we have achieved is still very small compared to the seriousness of human trafficking in Nepal, which needs continuous and integrated interventions to change public attitude and behavior. Breaking ground in the fight against trafficking is dangerous. We have encountered so many obstacles including resistance from unreasonable conservative communities, threats from traffickers, and frustrations in the failure of the legal system to provide justice to survivors. We are also daily witnesses and listeners to violations against women and children.

On a personal note, as a young female survivor-leader I have to overcome problems, such as seniority and negative reactions to feminism. I face challenges in choosing appropriate and responsive strategies selecting rights-based sensitive staff, enabling them to become more professional, and keeping them from burning out. But the suffering of survivors is what motivates us to continue this difficult mission.

We have also learned a lot from this work. First, everything can be changed for the better. But this needs time, persistence, accurate information, and proper planning with inputs from victims and all stakeholders. Second, empowering survivors to deal with problems by themselves needs to be effective and efficient. I am sure no one wants their daughters, sisters and mothers to be trafficked. Third, a leader in this kind of work must be dedicated. If the leader is uncommitted and afraid, members, the staff and the community will be the same. But if the leader is committed and brave, they will follow. Then, everything is possible. Fourth, coordination and networking is necessary for success to gain strength and confidence from people and institutions that they work with.

We struggled from our past when we spent a dreadful life which was like living in hell. After struggling, we realized that being trafficked was not our fault, and we turned our tears into power. This is why we are now able to stand up. So I have learned to be optimistic in my life and in this Shakti Samuha journey.

We at Shakti Samuha believe that society can be peaceful and prosperous only when men, women and children hold hands together with equal dignity and respect. This can be attained only with the participation and support from all sectors not only from women’s groups.

To conclude, we are very encouraged by your recognition. Shakti Samuha would not be as successful today without the help of our supporters. We hope the support continues.

Nangi Village, where MAHABIR PUN was born, rests high in the Himalayan foothills of western Nepal. Here and in surrounding Myagdi District live the PUN Magar, whose men for generations have soldiered across the globe as Gurkhas. Yet, their worldly careers have done little to change their sleepy homeland, so far from the traffic patterns that knit together the rest of the world. Indeed, Nangi is seven hours’ hard climb from the nearest road. No telephone lines have ever reached it. Despite this, these days the people of Nangi are definitely connected to the world outside. Wireless Internet technology has made this possible. MAHABIR PUN has made it happen. 

PUN passed his boyhood grazing cattle and sheep in mountain pastures and attending a village school that had no paper or pencils or books. Wanting more for his son, PUN’s father moved the family to Nepal?s lowlands, where, in Chitwan, PUN finished high school and became a teacher, working for twelve years to help his younger siblings through school. Finally, a timely scholarship led him to a bachelor?s degree at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Then, in 1992, after more than twenty years away, PUN returned home to Nangi, determined to make things easier for other youths than they had been for him. 

Nangi’s leaders were busy establishing a village high school. PUN eagerly joined in. Once a month, he made the two-day trip to the nearest major town of Pokhara to check his email and maintain his links to friends abroad. This led, in 1997, to the donation of four used computers from Australia. Powering them with hydro-generators in a nearby stream, PUN began teaching computer classes at the Nangi High School. More computers followed, but it proved impossible to get a telephone connection to Pokhara and the Internet. 

PUN emailed the British Broadcasting Corporation, asking for ideas. In 2001, the BBC publicized his dilemma and within a year volunteers from Europe and the United States were helping him rig a wireless connection between Nangi and the neighboring village of Ramche, using TV dish antennas mounted in trees. Some small grants soon led to the construction of improvised mountaintop relay stations and a link to Pokhara. By 2003, Nangi was online. 

As word of PUN’s project bounced around the World Wide Web, backpacking volunteers carried more and more donated computers, parts, and equipment into the hills. PUN expanded the wireless network to embrace twelve villages-distributing ninety used computers to local schools and communication centers, connecting them to the Internet, teaching teachers how to use them, and then troubleshooting until everything worked. 

Today, connectivity is changing Myagdi. Using PUN’s “tele-teaching” network, good teachers in one school now instruct students in others. Local health workers use Wi-Fi to consult specialists in Pokhara. Once-isolated students surf the Net and are learning globe-savvy skills. Villagers e-market local products such as buffaloes, honey, teas, and jams and use the Web to draw paying trekkers to campsites outfitted with solar-powered hot showers. In parallel projects, the people of Nangi have added a library, health clinic, and new high-school classrooms. Meanwhile in Kathmandu, PUN has successfully lobbied parliament to legitimize and democratize wireless technology in Nepal. 

PUN, now fifty-two, is both self-effacing and charismatic. “I’m not in charge of anything,” he says. Yet, he seems to be the driving force of much around him. Eventually, he says, the people of Myagdi District will have to carry on for themselves. In the meantime, he hopes to play his unique role indefinitely. “As long as I can walk,” PUN says happily, “I can do this.” 

In electing MAHABIR PUN to receive the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his innovative application of wireless computer technology in Nepal, bringing progress to remote mountain areas by connecting his village to the global village.

The Honorable Chief Justice, Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, fellow awardees, and brothers and sisters. 

All of us grow up with lots of wishes. And we know for a fact that many of the wishes that we make can’t be fulfilled. As a young boy my wishes were to have enough food to eat, and warm clothes and shoes to wear. I wished to have books to read, pens and papers to write on. As I grew older, I wished to go to college and to become an engineer so that I could get a better job and have a good life. However, many of my were wishes not fulfilled. 

Memories of my old days’ unfulfilled wishes have become my vision of creating better educational opportunities for rural children and creating job opportunities for disadvantage people so that they can have meaningful, peaceful and better lives. The wireless network that we created in some of the mountain villages for educational, medical, and local e-commerce purposes was just a small part of my vision to create better learning opportunities for the children, to provide medical assistance to villagers during emergency situations, and to bring communication tools for the villagers. We still have a long way to go to make the wireless technology truly useful for the people, and to replicate the wireless network all over the country. 

I am not the only person to have this vision. This was the vision of the late President Ramon Magsaysay, who worked hard to improve the lives of fellow Filipinos and helped them live freely, happily and with justice. This is a common vision of all young people, parents, and community leaders around the world, who are working hard to help others live happily with justice and in liberty. 

However, I never wished to get any kind of award. For the last fifteen years, I was working only to fulfill my vision within my capacity. Therefore this award was the greatest surprise of my life, and I am very thankful for it. This award has boosted my spirit very much and I feel much younger now even if I have crossed half a century of my life. 

Let me share with you my lifelong vision, for I believe that visions will only be wishes if we don’t share it and work on it. The first vision I have is to set up vocational training schools for rural people so that the young can get better jobs in the national and international job market. The second is to help people start income generating programs in rural areas that are viable there to create the local economy and to create jobs locally. My third vision is to establish a college by 2015 and a university later on for the children of poor people, who can’t afford to go to college or university. My fourth vision is to bring information and communication technology to the remote villages of my country and use it for educational, medical, commercial and communication purposes. I am working on this vision with like-minded fellows in Nepal. 

This international recognition will be helpful for us to reach the visions that I mentioned. In this way, we will be able to help a little to make the vision of late President Ramon Magsaysay come true. We will make it happen not by word but by deed. 

Thank you.

Cataracts, bane of the aging, are like clouds that gather over the eyes. They are the most common cause of blindness in Asia. In Nepal alone some half a million people are affected, the majority of whom live in remote areas where the curse of blindness is magnified by a harsh terrain and pervasive poverty. Yet, most of these people need not be blind at all, says Dr. SANDUK RUIT. Only the absence of medical care condemns them to darkness. RUIT, an eye surgeon and medical director of the Tilganga Eye Centre in Kathmandu, wants them to see again. 

SANDUK RUIT was born in a mountain area of Nepal so poor and remote that the nearest school was eleven days away, by foot. Diligence brought him a scholarship to be educated in India. When he was seventeen, his older sister died of tuberculosis and this painful loss led him to medicine. Upon completing medical school in India, he returned to Nepal as a government health officer. Following an assignment with the WHO Nepal Blindness Survey in 1980, he completed a residency in ophthalmology. Later, in Australia, he learned from his friend and mentor Dr. Fred Hollows the latest techniques in cataract microsurgery using implanted intraocular lenses. By 1988, he was introducing the new techniques in Nepal. 

There, RUIT faced the resistance of local eye surgeons. He patiently taught them the new procedures and began to win converts. With backing from the Nepal Eye Program Australia, he began trekking to Nepal’s far-flung towns to conduct eye camps, on-the-spot surgeries in which he almost instantly restored the sight of grateful country folk, hundreds at a time. While doing so, RUIT devised techniques to achieve hospital-quality standards of precision and sterility under makeshift conditions. These included his now-famous suture-less procedure that speeds cataract surgery and reduces patients? recovery time. 

RUIT opened the Tilganga Eye Centre (TEC) in 1994. It has become the hub of an ambitious expansion of eye-care services. In partnership with the Himalayan Cataract Project, TEC today manages six regional primary eye-care centers in Nepal. It operates Nepal’s only successful eye bank. It trains eye-care paramedics, medical residents, and nurses as well as visiting surgeons from Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia who come to learn Dr. RUIT’s techniques. It also manufactures extremely high-quality intraocular lenses for surgery and makes these once exorbitant implants-nearly 1.5 million of them so far-available to needy recipients in some fifty countries for less than US $5.00 apiece. Meanwhile, the Centre treats three thousand patients a week and has performed more than ninety thousand operations since its inception. Surgery at TEC is inexpensive and prorated according to ability to pay; the poor pay nothing at all. 

Today, RUIT’s mobile eye camps have expanded to China, India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and even to North Korea, where in June 2006 he and his team performed sight-restoring surgery on over 1,000 patients in six days. 

More than five hundred surgeons across Asia have now learned Dr. RUIT’s path-breaking techniques. “We Nepalese have never been known to give anything to other parts of the world,” he says. “I feel proud that we have given this expertise to many countries.”

The good doctor RUIT is famous for his stamina at the operating table and can perform one hundred surgeries in a single day. At fifty-one, he remains inspired by the joyful satisfaction of giving the gift of sight, especially to the poor. “Everyone deserves good vision,” he says. “There can be no children of a lesser god.”

In electing SANDUK RUIT to receive the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes his placing Nepal at the forefront of developing safe, effective, and economical procedures for cataract surgery, enabling the needlessly blind in even the poorest countries to see again.

The Honorable Chief Justice, Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, fellow Awardees and dear friends. 

I would like to express my heart-felt gratitude to the Trustees of the Foundation for selecting me as the winner of the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding. 

I am extremely excited and humbled by this honour given to me. 

On behalf of the hundreds of thousands of blinded cataract patients for whom I have played a small part in restoring their sight and giving them dignity in their lives, I accept this prestigious Award. 

Cataract continues to be the most common cause of blindness worldwide. It is estimated that nearly eighty million people are blind with cataract, and 90% of cataracts are found in the developing world. For nearly twenty years now, we have been working to provide a successful model of high-volume cataract surgery with a good vision outcome to be made available and accessible to the developing world. This required continuing innovations both in eye service management and eye surgery. 

Extensive research and development was done to produce low-cost and robust equipment, such as portable operating microscopes and YAG lasers. We have been successful in manufacturing state-of-the-art intra-ocular lenses locally for a unit cost of US $4, which was available elsewhere for US $100. The logistics, economics and efficiency of cataract surgery in its entirety was addressed to suit the large backlog of cataract blindness in poorer countries. 

Since then, this system has been introduced successfully to many countries crossing geographical and political boundaries. The training of surgeons, the establishment of eye centres and the conduct of model workshops have now spread to more than fifty countries globally. 

I once again would like to thank the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, as this Award will certainly give me more credibility and challenge me to continue my unfinished agenda. I would also like to acknowledge the support of that most wonderful group of people whom I work with at the Tilganga Eye Centre in Nepal, and our partners, the Fred Hollows Foundation and the Himalayan Cataract Project.

Until the 1950s, Nepal’s hereditary rulers held the kingdom in isolation from the rest of the world. Afterwards, the country opened slowly and, until today, many of Nepal’s people remain scattered in thousands of rural villages accessible only by footpath. Fewer than half can read. And only one in a hundred receives a newspaper. Altogether, poor soil for journalism! Yet BHARAT KOIRALA, a journalist, has been tilling this stingy soil for nearly forty years. In doing so, he has made journalism a valuable component of his country’s belated awakening to modernity. 

Born in 1942, KOIRALA was educated at Tribhuvan University in Katmandu and soon became a newspaperman. Rising Nepal, where he began, and its sister Nepali-language Gorakhapatra, were government organs. As KOIRALA rose eventually to lead the state-owned Gorakhapatra publishing house, he practiced “a heavy dose of self-censorship,” he admits. Even so, he managed to expand the domain of the press. He encouraged his young reporters to write good stories and shielded them when the results offended someone in power. And he steered them to cover Nepal’s economic development and its impact on the rural population. True, such stories were safe, but KOIRALA understood they were also important. 

In 1984, KOIRALA established the Nepal Press Institute. In its workshops and courses, he introduced beginning and mid-career journalists not only to new skills but also to professional ethics and standards and to the role of the media as a public watchdog-laying the groundwork for an independent press in years to come. In 1985, he helped form the Nepal Forum for Environmental Journalists, to foster in-depth reporting on the country’s environment. KOIRALA linked both of these efforts to affiliated programs abroad, drawing Nepal’s rising journalists into important international dialogues. 

After leaving Gorakhapatra in 1986, KOIRALA turned his attention to Nepal’s rural world, where fully half the districts had no access to national newspapers. To fill the gap, he began mounting huge billboard-style newspapers on walls in rural towns. With funding from the Agricultural Development Bank, these popular “wall newspapers” soon proliferated in Nepal?s remote hill districts. 

When a democratic revolution overtook Nepal in 1990, KOIRALA played an important role in the transition to greater press freedom. Still impassioned about bringing information to the rural masses, he encouraged small cities and towns to put up their own newspapers and led the Press Institute to set up branches to train countryside reporters. 

Increasingly, however, KOIRALA focused his hopes on radio. Radios, he noted, are cheap. They run on batteries or solar power and their signals can reach where power lines and delivery trucks cannot. Moreover, he says, the radio “transcends literacy.” KOIRALA made it his mission to promote locally owned and operated radio stations in rural Nepal. A dozen have succeeded. Meanwhile, leading a consortium of four NGOs, KOIRALA himself launched Sagarmatha, Nepal’s first private FM radio station. It offers music and public affairs programming and also takes in trainees — a true KOIRALA touch. 

The urbane KOIRALA works quietly and always in concert with friends and colleagues. He excels at initiating projects and linking them to funders and then, as one friend puts it, letting them “thrive on their own.” Today, his impact reaches far and wide, from the country’s growing cadre of professional journalists to the wall newspapers posted across the hill districts. His diverse initiatives have a common thread. As Koirala says of community radio stations, they are “helping create a free, independent, and pluralistic media and promoting public debate in our democracy.” 

In electing BHARAT KOIRALA to receive the 2002 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his developing professional journalism in Nepal and unleashing the democratizing powers of a free media.

Madame President, Excellencies, President and Trustees of the Foundation, Distinguished Guests, Fellow Awardees, Ladies and Gentlemen: 

It is a great honour and privilege for me to be this year’s recipient of the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts. I have, thus become the second Nepalese to be conferred this honour after 25 years. Soon after the Awards were announced I had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Mahesh Chandra Regmi who received the Award in the same category in 1977. Even though Dr. Regmi suffers from Parkinson’s disease, and partially paralysed, is confined to the wheel chair he expressed his deep appreciation of the honor conferred on him and his joy that another Nepali had received the award. 

Even though I had some knowledge of the honour and prestige attached to the Ramon Magsaysay Award I could understand its full significance only when the awards were announced. The news arrived at a time when the country was looking for something positive in the midst of chaos and confusion. The Award was considered an honour not only to me or our journalist community but to the country itself. 

Certainly, the Foundation deserves the appreciation of the Nepalese people for recognizing the positive achievements of a process started many years ago that finally has begun to bear fruit. The Nepalese media which suffered for over a century under various forms of autocratic rule finally emerged as a free and independent entity following the restoration of democracy in 1990. The media became more institutionalized, received massive investment in new technology, training of journalists was undertaken at an unprecedented level and media institutions undertook many innovative approaches to increase the flow of information to and from the rural areas. Nepal is a country of villages, 80 % of the 23 million people live in over 40,000 villages some of which are located in difficult mountainous regions. Isolated by mountains and valleys these villages are cut off from the various media of communication largely located in urban centres. 

Through these new approaches that include wall newspapers put up on walls of public buildings and tea shops, audio towers that inform villagers in their own homes and radio stations that are owned and operated by rural communities, and tiny newspapers that are prized by neo-literates in remote villages are beginning to change lives and improve living conditions. A number of dedicated journalists and media organizations are at the forefront of this enterprise to provide media access to people living in far-flung areas. 

We are grateful to the Foundation for recognizing this silent revolution in a remote part of the world. I am sure the award will draw more attention of the government, civil society, the private sector and the international community to what is happening in Nepalese villages. We hope that these efforts will bring about positive changes in our villages that at the moment seem remote to many. The Award has raised the morale of a society that have fallen into despondency. 

I wish once again to thank you for the Award and its impact on Nepalese society. It should also provide encouragement to the younger generation of journalists to become involved in enterprises that encourage selfless devotion to the welfare of ordinary people. Thank you.

History is a many angled mirror in which nations easily see themselves as they wish they were. Especially are political histories prone to convey a grand panorama of wars, rulers and a panoply of other prominent personages, while scant attention if any, is given to the peasant who first fashioned a better hoe or selected a superior fruit or grain variety.

Identifying a broader history is particularly critical in countries like Nepal, which is only recently emerging from feudalism and legally abolished slavery in 1925. Where other nations have had centuries to sift and sort fragments of their past and settle upon an agreed interpretation, modern communications and development demands force a telescoping of decisions. Choices of what is unique, valuable and viable must be made rapidly and will become binding upon the future.

Less than two centuries ago the numerous fiefs of hill rajas along the southern escarpment of the Himalayas were unified by the military mastery of the house of Gurkha. In the 19th century these people, tracing their ethnic origins to Mongols and Tibetans, and to Rajputs and Brahmans from the Indian plains, speaking numerous dialects and holding diverse faiths, were welded into a kingdom. National isolation was sought in order to shield themselves from British-Indian domination from the south and Tibetan-Chinese from the north. Consequently Nepal today, with a population nearing 13 million, ranks among the least modernized nations, with a literacy rate of less than 20 percent.

MAHESH REGMI’S research and translation service, started in 1957, was a new kind of enterprise for Nepal. His weekly Nepal Press Digest has become an effective journal of contemporary reporting within the kingdom. It is a valued source for diplomats in Kathmandu and vital for the United Nations and other organizations seeking to assist in Nepal’s progress. The Regmi Research Series, printed for “private study and research” on a subscription basis, is opening chapters of Nepal’s past to her own and international scholars.

REGMI has also produced three major scholarly works. Land Tenure and Taxation in Nepal was published in four volumes at Berkeley, California, between 1963 and 1968. A Study in Nepali Economic History 1768-1846, detailing the agrarian basis of the society during national unification, appeared in 1971. In 1976 followed Landownership in Nepal, an analysis of the origin and evolution of the rural problems besetting 95 percent of his countrymen.

Born in 1929 into a Nepali family with a scholarly tradition, REGMI was tutored at home by his father until he enrolled at Trichandra College in Kathmandu where he took his bachelor’s degree in 1948. He entered His Majesty’s Government of Nepal in 1951 as Acting Director of Industries and, concurrently for brief periods, of Cottage Industries and the Central Purchase Department, before embarking upon his own venture. In 1961-62 he was Member Secretary of the Royal Taxation and Land Reform commissions. In and out of government service, his commitment has been to understanding, explaining and furthering the lot of the Nepali peasant whose hillside farm beneath the towering Himalayas remains the foundation of Nepalese society.

In electing MAHESH CHANDRA REGMI to receive the 1977 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts, the Board of Trustees recognized his chronicling of Nepal’s past and present, enabling his people to discover their origins and delineating national options.

It is with a sense of great humility that I accept the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts tonight, for I had never imagined that my work would attract the attention of an institution as prestigious as the Magsaysay Foundation. I can not say I am delighted with this great honor, for my feelings at this moment are deeper and steadier than the exuberance and intensity that the term implies. May I say, therefore, that I feel deeply satisfied.

Let me add, however, that this sense of satisfaction is not due solely to the recognition that has been given to the work to which I have dedicated the past 20 years of my life. That work has brought sufficient recompense in itself. The thrill of exploring the unknown frontiers of knowledge, the occasional exhilaration of being able to fit little-known aspects of the social and economic life of my fellow countrymen into a larger coherent picture, these have been sufficient rewards to me over the years for the wearying and taxing effort that research and writing involve. Moreover, public recognition and acclaim have never had any appeal for me, nor have I ever put pen to paper in the hope of meriting such an award.

For me the Award that you have conferred is valuable mainly because, as the Foundation has graciously noted, my commitment has always been to understanding, explaining, and furthering the lot of the Nepali peasant. Tonight, when I realize that my own personal commitment and concern have been accepted for what they are by the Foundation, I feel deeply satisfied.

There is yet another and still greater source of satisfaction. I am sobered and uplifted by the association with the greatness of spirit, integrity, and devotion to freedom of your late noble and illustrious President, that the Award implies. I have been inspired by what I have read in one of his biographies: “Family love, a profound and simple religious sense, and the love of the country and its people are the component parts of Magsaysay that combine to make him a whole and dedicated human being.” For me, therefore, the real significance of this Ramon Magsaysay Award, this great honor, lies in the inspiration it has given me to try to perfect myself as a whole and dedicated human being by following in the footsteps of that great man.