Nepalese dying to work

Kathmandu, Nepal (CNN) – Twenty-one-year-old Ramila Syangden weeps uncontrollably as she clutches her 10-month-old baby. She sits and watches as the pyre where her husband’s body will be cremated is set alight in the open Nepalese air.

Syangden never considered one of the potential consequences of her husband’s decision to work abroad. Now she can’t ignore it.

Hours before the Buddhist cremation ceremony she watched the coffin, with her husband’s body inside, arrive on a flight from Saudi Arabia where he had worked.

The paperwork says the 36-year old committed suicide there. Not a single person gathered for the cremation ceremony believes it.

“I don’t think so. He said he would go abroad, see the place, earn as much as he could for the children and come back. I think somebody killed him,“ his wife said.

She may never know exactly what happened to him. But the family says he had every reason to live. He was a retired police officer collecting a pension. He was healthy and he’d been working in Saudi Arabia for less than a month without any complaints.

“When my son went I thought that he would earn money for the family but his dead body came back instead,” his father, Sonam Singh Bomjang, said.

He can’t believe his son died this way, especially considering he survived being shot by Maoists while serving as a Nepali police officer.