The hardest thing about this job is not being able to do anything for the women I meet. As the representative of an organization that focuses on lobbying, capacity building, and networking between NGOs, I have nothing but abstract concepts and vague promises to make to women who have very real and immediate needs. My interview with Padma Kumari was the last of fourteen interviews that I conducted with women across Nepal, and the stories seemed to only be getting more and more tragic. Perhaps it was not that the stories themselves were any more severe, but that I was suffering from the cumulative toll of so many interviews—so many interactions in which I could only take information (about their lives, their poverty, their symptoms, their pain) from women without being able to give anything in
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