Olga Murray, right, watches as Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation volunteers confront a woman believed to be a slave. Photo by Carlos Avila Gonzalez for the San Francisco Chronicle.

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Olga Murray's efforts to end the servitude of girls in Nepal has received a major boost from the government of Nepal, which for the first time allocated $1.6 million a year to support education and job training for the rescued girls.

"It looks as though we will reach our goal of eradicating the bonding practice sooner now," says Murray, 83, the founder and president of the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation, based in Sausalito, Calif.

The NYOF has rescued 4,000 girls to date, in part by providing families with pigs or goats to replace the money they would have received for selling their daughters. The NYOF has also waged a widespread campaign to end practice of buying and selling of girls in Nepal.

Murray launched her encore career after retiring as an attorney. She helped write opinions for California Chief Justice Phil Gibson for nine years and continued working for Justice Stanley Mosk for another 25 years.

Murray founded NYOF in 1990, after she fell in love with Nepal on a post-retirement trekking trip. She vowed to help the incredibly poor children she met there, whose only desire was to go to school. “I didn’t want to sit around and eat bonbons and polish my nails,” she recalls.

Her novel idea: Offer poor families a pig or a goat in exchange for not selling their daughters into domestic servitude. Her organization also pays for the girls’ school expenses and gives the families kerosene lamps, which are highly prized in areas without electricity.

Murray was featured on Encore.org in July 2008, after Meredith May's story in the San Francisco Chronicle. After a subsequent trip to Nepal, funded by the Pulitzer Center, May found that destitute families were selling their daughters for $75, the equivalent of a third of their annual income, to work as kamlaris, or servants in the home of higher-caste families.

May wrote in her Pulitzer Center account, “Girls as young as 6 are forced into years of menial labor, cooking, cleaning and babysitting in the homes of strangers. Kamlaris typically work from sunup to sundown, eat leftovers and sleep on the floor and, in the worst cases, are beaten and raped.”