WGBH Openvault

FRONTLINE / WORLD; Nepal: A Girl's Life

06/07/2007

Nepal: A Girl’s Story Clean and texted versions


License Clip

More material is available from this program at the WGBH Archive. If you are a researcher interested in accessing the collection at WGBH, please email archive_requests@wgbh.org.

Undigitized item: Request Digitization

Untranscribed item: Request Transcription

Series
FRONTLINE / WORLD
Program
Nepal: A Girl's Life
Program Description

Web Only Broadcast

"Once upon a time there was a girl whose name was Sabina Timilsina..."

So begins "A Girl's Life" in the sing-song broken English of a 9-year-old who lives in a village outside Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. It's the voice of a girl narrating her own life. A girl with a mother, a father and a brother. A girl who rises at dawn, brushes her teeth, and goes to school. A girl who likes to play volleyball and badminton, but most of all loves to read.

You can tell right away she's playful and smart, but her story seems rather ordinary -- until you realize that her family is of the lowest caste, the Dalits, or "untouchables," who typically earn their living breaking rocks. In a country where 70 percent of the women are illiterate, Sabina is an exception, an extraordinarily lucky girl who has a scholarship that will take her through high school.

Sabina's benefactor is an American named John Wood, who started a literacy program called Room to Read, the subject of this week's Rough Cut by FRONTLINE/World's Senior Associate Producer Sachi Cunningham.

Asset Type

Broadcast program

Media Type

Video

Citation
Chicago: “FRONTLINE / WORLD; Nepal: A Girl's Life,” 06/07/2007, WGBH Media Library & Archives, accessed May 26, 2017, http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_17E92E4FE7B6455D81628A7122682942.
MLA: “FRONTLINE / WORLD; Nepal: A Girl's Life.” 06/07/2007. WGBH Media Library & Archives. Web. May 26, 2017. <http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_17E92E4FE7B6455D81628A7122682942>.
APA: FRONTLINE / WORLD; Nepal: A Girl's Life. Boston, MA: WGBH Media Library & Archives. Retrieved from http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_17E92E4FE7B6455D81628A7122682942
If you have more information about this item, we want to know! Please contact us, including the URL.