Laura Spero is an independent producer, and founder of Jevaia International (www.jevaia.org). She has spent more than a decade in rural Nepal, where she has reported numerous radio stories and maintains a multimedia blog, www.allthepiecesof.com, which features many — many — unreasonable accounts of her trying to help out as a subsistence farmer. Laura’s blog series Between Worlds looks at how labor migration is changing ritual mourning in Nepal, and explores the role of culture in grief and loss.
Traditionally, widows can be shunned or deprived of basic rights in Nepal, consigned to a life of ritual mourning. But as more young men in Nepal die while working abroad, some of those restrictions are loosening.