Kathmandu, Oct. 21 -- At around 7.30pm, New Road was alive with shoppers heading home beneath the streetlights. Lal Kumari Rokaya moved through the crowd with a plastic money plant draped around her neck, looking for someone willing to buy it.

For many in the crowd, the evening marked the end of a day of shopping and the journey home. For Rokaya, it was another evening spent trying to earn enough to get by. She was selling artificial money plants to make ends meet, but she did not have the money to return to her hometown in Jumla for Dashain, Nepal's biggest Hindu festival.

Rokaya, 26, had been selling the plastic plants for a month. She had arrived in Kathmandu with her family just two months earlier, hoping to build a better life in t...