Rukshana Kapali/Pahichan – First of all, I would like to thank Pahichan Media for providing me opportunity to express my experience about the coverage of LGBTI issues in Nepalbhasa (Newari). Nepal is a homeland to diverse ethnicity and linguistic groups.

The Newa people are among of them, the indigenous inhabitants of Kathmandu Valley. With rise of LGBTI awareness and rights across the globe, Nepal has also been progressively moving ahead towards ensuring LGBTI rights. With this move, it is necessary that LGBTI issues should get priority in different media outlets. It is also being carried out by vernacular media.

When it comes to indigenous media, LGBTI issues are at low exposure.  Therefore, I felt that issues related to LGBTI should get widespread coverage in Nepalbhasa media.   My journey as a blogger started then. Looking at the media of my own ethnic group, LGBTI issues are less exposed, and hereby for a person with no/less knowledge of Nepali language is not exposed to it.

It is said that “If you talk to a man in a language he understands that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language goes to heart.”

After I started blogging, I advertised my blog to different Facebook groups which helped to increase my readers. The blog mostly contains news about LGBTI whereas at the initial I started from awareness creating issues. Through this blog, I have come to contact with dozens of people who were curious about LGBTI, and the blog has helped them to be aware on this matter. In a similar way, many of the news are also published in the website called “Newa Daboo” which is an online newspaper of Nepalbhasa. I have also written different articles about the issues in “Lipi Pau” a monthly magazine in Prachalit script.

I started by blog at Blogger: http://lgbtinepalbhasa.blogspot.com/ and now slowly shifting it to WordPress: https://newalgbti.wordpress.com/. In similar way, I have used Facebook as a medium of awareness as well.

A big challenge for me was answering and dealing with close- minded people over internet and real life as well.  The LGBTI issues are centralized only in Nepali language media which is a marginalization to our movement in multi-lingual country. Therefore, I appeal all LGBTI individuals to exposing our issues in their own ethnic media as well, rather than only sticking to Nepali language media.