OPINION

Volunteers, locals should lead Asia’s HIV battle

News, Published on 23/07/2014

» Twenty-six-year-old Laxmi never imagined she would grow up to be a heroine. When she was 14, she ran away from a miserable childhood in her remote, mountainous village in Nepal and tried to find work as a singer in the country’s third largest city Pokhara. But instead of stardom, Laxmi fell into prostitution and joined the many thousands of Nepali women working in the country’s flourishing sex industry.