The Disappearance of Dahlia Yehia (Part 1/2)
BY
Foreign Policy
On the rainy afternoon of Aug. 5, 2015, Dahlia Yehia stepped off a public bus in the center of Pokhara, Nepal, a resort town nestled on a lake at the foot of the western Himalayas. Pokhara is a popular starting point for treks to some of the planet’s highest peaks, including Dhaulagiri, Annapurna, and Machapuchare, revered as sacred in the Hindu faith. During mountaineering season — roughly October to April — tourists crowd Pokhara’s Lakeside Road, a mile-long strip of businesses offering guided pony tours, paragliding courses, and sightseeing flights.
Yehia, a slender 25-year-old Egyptian-American with dark, soulful eyes and a shy demeanor, couldn’t afford those kinds of outings. She was backpacking on a shoestring budget and hoping to relax for a few days before deciding on her next destination. She wasn’t carrying much: her bag, a few articles of clothing, some novels, a diary that doubled as a sketchbook, and an iPhone 5. She hadn’t bought a local SIM card, so Yehia had to rely on Wi-Fi to use her phone. Connectivity in the Himalayas was spotty, however, and she hadn’t contacted her friends or family for several days.
One of her first stops in Pokhara was an Internet café, where, through the message app Voxer, she sent a short note to Robert Klugerman, a close friend back in the United States whom Yehia had met in college. “Hey I’m back to civilization,” she wrote.
Klugerman heard from Yehia again a day later. She had found a place to stay and was hanging out in the Lakeside area. She had discovered a German bakery that made cinnamon rolls, an exotic treat in Nepal. “[I]t’s rainy season [and] there are no tourists so it’s really beautiful here and peaceful,” she wrote. “I think I will rest for a week or so.”
Later that same day, Yehia texted Klugerman that a mysterious rash she’d had once before on her trip had returned. She sent a close-up photo of the red patch on her skin, along with a message: “Guess what’s back. Sigh.”
Then, Dahlia Yehia vanished without a trace.
The harrowing story of what happened — or didn’t happen — to Yehia has humble origins thousands of miles from the Himalayas. Yehia was raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a town of about 75,000 people midway between Chicago and Detroit. Her father, who worked in health care services, and mother, a doctor, were originally from Egypt. Friends say the couple expected Yehia would stay close to home and one day marry within their Islamic faith. (Both parents declined to be interviewed.)
Despite her cloistered childhood, Yehia was determined to go her own way. At Portage Central High School, she excelled at painting and drawing. She also became passionate about humanitarian issues. During her senior year, a representative from a charity called 4 OneWorld spoke about child soldiers in Uganda to one of her classes. Yehia was so moved, teacher Jason Frink recalls, that she created an art portfolio depicting child fighters, including a charcoal sketch of a hollow-eyed boy clutching a Kalashnikov rifle. 4 OneWorld used the image in promotional materials. “You felt like you were looking into the eyes of that child,” Frink says.
After high school, Yehia enrolled at Kalamazoo College and majored in art. She spent a semester abroad in Ecuador, where she explored the Galapagos Islands, hiked in the Andean foothills, and ruminated with friends about the future. “We liked to talk about how we would change the world,” says Katie Weeks, who roomed with Yehia all four years of college. “She wanted to continue to do her art and use it to make a difference.”
Yehia left Kalamazoo for good in early 2012, the year after she graduated. She found a job as an art instructor in Phoenix and drove 1,900 miles solo to get there. “[T]he longest I’d ever driven at one time was 6 hours, [and] I didn’t know anybody where I was going,” she wrote on a personal blog at the time. Yehia lived in her car and hung out in coffee shops before finding two roommates on Craigslist, but she didn’t stay in Phoenix long. At the end of the school year, she moved on. Teaching jobs followed at charter schools in Boston and in Austin, Texas. “She was a nomadic person,” Klugerman explains.
Work left Yehia unsatisfied. Many students had absent or drug-addicted parents, and she didn’t know how to assist them. “The kids would come and ask her for help, but there was little she could do,” Weeks says. “She bleeds for other people. She feels this kind of stuff really deep.” Yehia also complained that she wasn’t given a classroom some days and had to scrounge through garbage bins for art supplies.
In May 2015, after three years of teaching, Yehia announced she was taking a break. She had applied for master’s programs, other teaching jobs, and spots at art communes in the United States, but “she would keep traveling until she decided to stop or got accepted somewhere,” Klugerman says.
Yehia planned to explore Southeast Asia for a few months, using the small savings she had accumulated while teaching. She had already visited South America and spent some time in Egypt. Asia, though, was tabula rasa. After a brief visit to Michigan, Yehia boarded a flight to Thailand. She explored Bangkok, which she found hot and oppressive, and Chiang Mai, which she liked much more. At her next stop, Yehia decided that she wanted to put her idle hands to use by volunteering. So she set her sights on Nepal, then reeling from catastrophe.
On April 25, 2015, an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, had ripped through the Kathmandu Valley and hundreds of remote villages. The quake and its aftershocks toppled more than 500,000 buildings, including ancient temples; 2.8 million people were left homeless and about 9,000 died. In the weeks that followed, while Chinese, Indian, and U.S. military helicopters flew rescue missions, ad hoc relief groups — financed by donors on Facebook, GoFundMe, and other websites — delivered food, medicine, and supplies to affected communities.
A stampede of Western visitors also poured into Nepal, drawn by earthquake recovery updates and the country’s Shangri-La mystique. Many of these well-intentioned volunteers were recently out of college and lacked experience in disaster relief, according to locals. NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati, a Nepalese photographer who helped found the aid group Yellow House, describes one young man who refused to wear shoes. “He was going to these extremely rough places with landslides, and he insisted on wearing only flip-flops,” Kakshapati explains. “He said, ‘But the locals wear them.’ He probably slowed everybody else down.” In an article for Slate not long after the quake, humanitarian-aid veteran Jessica Alexander advised, “Don’t go to Nepal. You will cause more problems than you solve.”
Yehia, however, purchased a roughly $300 one-way plane ticket from Bangkok to Kathmandu, landing in mid-July. Peter Fröhlich, an Austrian backpacker also hoping to volunteer, met Yehia at a guesthouse near Kathmandu’s touristy Thamel district, where a bed could be had for $2 a night. Together, they contacted Lokendra Badu, a 31-year-old Nepali who they had learned through the travelers’ grapevine was running a relief effort. At the end of July, Badu sent them and another volunteer, a young woman from Hong Kong, to Muchchok, his home village in Nepal’s hard-hit Gorkha district.
The three volunteers, accompanied by a local guide, loaded boxes of school stationery and solar-powered lights into empty seats and onto the roof of a public bus. After exiting Kathmandu, the aging vehicle switch-backed through the Himalayan foothills. The road wound through a landscape of lush, terraced rice paddies before giving way to a rough dirt track that ended at a massive rockslide. On foot, the group carried their supplies up a steep path to Muchchok. Yehia, laden with a heavy pack, and the volunteer from Hong Kong fell behind, staggering into the village nearly two hours after the others. “Dahlia was so skinny and not strong,” Badu says.
The foreigners helped plant rice, taught school for a day, and distributed the solar lamps to children. “[We told them], ‘Now you don’t have an excuse for not doing your homework after dark,’” Yehia said in an iPhone audio message she recorded and later sent to Klugerman. “The kids probably hate us now, but it’s cool.”
Yet the romance of the trip quickly faded; the work was arduous, and the scene devastating. “You get there and it’s totally fucked up,” Fröhlich says, adding that the foreigners felt “like spectators at a disaster.” He and Yehia departed after just four days. They walked back down the footpath to the main road and boarded a bus to a nearby junction, where Fröhlich would head east to Kathmandu, Yehia in the opposite direction to Pokhara.
Before they parted, Yehia borrowed a stranger’s cell phone to call someone she hoped to stay with — a man she had met online. Yehia arranged to meet him later that afternoon, Fröhlich remembers hearing.
“All I know,” Fröhlich says, “is that he was ‘the Couchsurfing guy.’”
In 2000, American Casey Fenton decided to take a low-budget trip to Iceland. He emailed 1,500 students at the University of Iceland, looking for a place to crash in Reykjavik, and received some 50 offers of free accommodations. Many people, he realized, would turn over their sofas or spare beds to strangers for the chance to rub shoulders with foreigners. In 2004, Fenton inaugurated Couchsurfing.com, a networking site where economy travelers could connect with willing hosts. Couchsurfing describes itself today as “a global community of 10 million people in more than 200,000 cities.”
Couchsurfing screens users through a voluntary review system. Guests describe whether hosts are hospitable, clean, and so on. By those metrics, Narayan Paudel was a standout in Pokhara. Paudel, now 32, joined the site in 2012 and racked up high marks among the dozen or so guests who reviewed him. He was featured in a Nepali Times article on Couchsurfing in 2014; beneath a photo of him grinning while seated on a bed in his apartment, Paudel said his top concern was making his guests feel comfortable. The newspaper quoted one Couchsurfing reviewer, Sofia Palma from Portugal, who wrote, “Narayan is one of the very few Nepali guys who I can say with 100% sure [sic] that I would trust my life.”
It was no surprise, then, that out of the roughly 600 Couchsurfing hosts in Pokhara, Yehia chose to stay with Paudel. (She had used the service before — in Thailand, for instance.) After arriving in town, she messaged Klugerman to say she’d found a male host, though she didn’t offer specifics. She “never mentioned the name of anyone she met” traveling, Klugerman explains. Yehia said she’d eaten dinner with the man and his girlfriend and that he was “super nice.”
That week, Klugerman was driving from Texas to New York to attend a wedding. He stopped in New Orleans, where he sent Yehia photos of a lamb dish he knew she would covet. “Humph, I’m getting the feeling that New Orleans was nothing special … which is good cuz you saved me a trip,” she replied sardonically. When he got to New York, he sent her pictures from the wedding.
When he didn’t hear back, Klugerman texted Yehia jokingly, “Hey, you still alive?” A few hours later, wondering if the time difference had kept her from replying, he wrote, “Did you wake up yet?”
Radio silence.
After 24 hours, Klugerman figured Pokhara had been hit by a power failure and Yehia couldn’t get a message out. Or maybe she had gone to do more volunteer work. But why wouldn’t she have mentioned it?
When several days passed without a word, Klugerman’s puzzlement turned into fear. Perhaps she was sick or injured, or maybe she’d been kidnapped. On Aug. 18 he reached out to Couchsurfing’s support staff, but that proved a dead end. In correspondence shared by Klugerman, an employee identified as “Amelia” confirmed that Yehia hadn’t been active on the website for 12 days. The support team sent messages to other users whom Yehia was supposed to visit, to see if she’d arrived. “I will follow up with you if I hear anything,” Amelia wrote. “[I]f this is something that you are very worried about, you can follow up with the police directly, as they are empowered to take further actions.” (Couchsurfing International declined to comment for this article.)
Klugerman also reached out to Yehia’s parents to see what they knew — only to learn that they hadn’t heard from their daughter either. Around two weeks after Yehia slipped off the radar, her parents informed the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu.
Klugerman, Weeks, and other friends began spreading the word that Yehia was missing. Klugerman designed fliers bearing photos of Yehia, made versions in both English and Nepali, and sent them to more than two dozen expat-heavy organizations in Kathmandu, hoping staff would pass the announcements around town and in the nearby hills. Then Klugerman and several friends blasted messages to hundreds of Couchsurfing hosts in Kathmandu and Pokhara, asking if anyone had been in contact with Yehia.
The barrage of queries bore fruit when Paudel messaged Klugerman toward the end of August. He wrote that he had seen Yehia off the morning of Aug. 7, the day after her final contact with Klugerman. She had mentioned the possibility of hitchhiking for a little while before returning to Kathmandu. Paudel had no idea what had happened to Yehia after that.
Klugerman notified the U.S. Embassy that the last person known to have seen Yehia was her Couchsurfing host. The embassy (which declined to comment for this story) sent officials to a four-story apartment building in Pokhara’s Simpani neighborhood, a jumble of concrete structures hugging a hillside overlooking the Seti River. Paudel was in the street, repairing his motorbike. He ushered the officials into his ground-floor apartment, an 8-by-14-foot room with one window facing the road. Scarcely bigger than a walk-in closet, the apartment had two twin beds set perpendicular to each other. They were so close that two people lying in them would have been able to hear each other breathe.
A paunchy, tall, pleasant-faced man who spoke good English, Paudel said Yehia had stayed with him for three days. He hadn’t seen her much, because he studied in the early morning — he was working toward a degree in sociology — and then taught English and science at a primary school. After the conversation, the consular officers left.
Meanwhile, wondering if Yehia’s iPhone contained clues to her whereabouts, her friends and family reached out to Apple. An emergency-support team explained that it might be possible to track her movements through her phone’s International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, a unique, 15-digit code assigned to all cellular devices. Her family contacted U.S. Embassy officials with this information; the embassy, Klugerman says, obtained the IMEI code and passed it to the Central Investigation Bureau (CIB), Nepal’s equivalent of the FBI. According to Nepalese police, the CIB then delivered the number to Nepal Telecom, which maintains a database of the country’s SIM cards.
When a call is made on a mobile phone, the nearest cell tower registers the IMEI and SIM numbers being used. Nepal Telecom’s records showed that someone had inserted a SIM card into Yehia’s phone and tried to make calls from Aug. 18-21 — long after Yehia went missing. The company was able to retrieve the identity of the SIM card’s owner based on information provided at the time of purchase, and it alerted the CIB to what it had found.
The card was registered to Paudel.