Thread by @mollymotoole

The #2020 election is in less than a week, the #Dodgers won the World Series, but I hope you'll stick with me for a story I chased for more than 3.5 years from Nepal to Saudi Arabia and back, equal parts existential dread & unparalleled joy @latimes THREAD lat.ms/35KuHBh

@latimes Santoshi’s nightmares repeat. Someone brings her to the woods and leaves her there alone. Then she sees the pyre where the body is burning, the body she burned after her husband Subash, a migrant worker, was declared dead in Saudi Arabia 5 years ago. The body reaches for her 1/

They believed setting the body aflame would free the soul. Instead, it now haunts two families, forever connected by the macabre events that began unfolding in a desert 4,000 miles away. Santoshi said she always held onto the hope that Subash would come back to life. He did. 2/

On July 9, 2015, Subash and 3 Nepalese co-workers hired a taxi outside the power plant where they lived and worked on the outskirts of Jidda, Saudi Arabia’s largest port city, for Hyundai Heavy Industries, the $40b Korean construction behemoth. Subash made $7 a day. 3/

Under Saudi Arabia's kafala system, the legal status of migrant workers is tethered to employers, who control every aspect of workers' lives-where they work, eat, sleep, & whether they can leave the country-for years. Coronavirus has only worsened this indentured servitude. 4/

Nepal, squeezed between India and China, exports more workers per capita than any other country in Asia, many to the Gulf. In recent years, remittances from wages earned abroad have represented up to a third of Nepal's GDP — the most of any country in the world. 5/

But many never come home. Of the millions of Nepalis who have gone overseas for work in the last decade, roughly 7,500 have died. More than 2,000 Nepalese laborers have died in Saudi Arabia alone, roughly one every two days. bit.ly/2HIT8XB 6/

The power plant where Subash and the others worked is emblematic of MBS's Vision 2030-and its inherent contradictions. The crown prince said his brainchild would modernize Saudi Arabia by reducing its reliance on oil wealth, government subsidies and foreign laborers like them 7/

MBS has levied penalties to get companies to hire more Saudis. But Saudi unemployment remains high, it's become more authoritarian, Vision 2030 has fallen far short of 2020 marks, & it’s being scaled back. A Saudi spox said Vision 2030 “might need to be modified periodically” 8/

Back to Subash. The taxi driver, Tejendra, is Nepali, too. They head to send money home to Nepal. They crash. 3 die on impact. 2 survivors are airlifted to the hospital, where 1 dies the next day. With the sole survivor in a coma, Hyundai identifies the last dead man as Subash 9/

It takes Hyundai more than a month to send the bodies back to Nepal, and Santoshi burns Subash's body in Buddhist funeral rites. Now she's left a 26 year old widow in a country where they are shunned, with two young kids and a massive debt on their small house. 10/

Months after the taxi crash in Jidda, in September 2015, the lone survivor woke up in King Abdulaziz Hospital with a metal plate in his head, a rod in his arm and jumbled memories. But he remembered one thing clearly: His name was Subash Tamang. 11/

Tejendra was the one who'd died, but it would take Subash 2 years to get home. To date, neither Hyundai nor Saudi authorities have admitted full responsibility to either family — one mistakenly told their loved one was dead, the other mistakenly told he was alive. 12/

For years I've obsessed over this resurrection. But there's a larger, darker truth: Saudi Arabia's modernization push relies on a system akin to modern slavery that reduces South Asian workers to expendable, indistinguishable bodies. PLEASE read @latimes ! lat.ms/3kxhfqx