Poverty exacerbates the drama of selling girls like Sharifa, 10, whose mother has to give her to a relative in exchange for 1,500 euros
Sharifa looks at her mother seriously. He is ten years old, he has never set foot in school. The red scarf shows off her dark complexion and round eyes. Beautiful eyes with a sad, empty look. “Mom, why did you do this to me?” is the only sentence that comes out of his mouth. His mother, Rukia, cries inconsolably with a baby in her arms.
Sharifa is the eldest of six siblings and has just been sold to a relative for 150,000 Afghans, about $1,500 in exchange. The money has already been spent because they needed it to pay for medical treatment for the father, a truck driver who had an accident and is struggling to death in a hospital in Pakistan. Now the buyer claims the little girl, whom he wants to marry off to his 15-year-old son. “I’m sorry I don’t have the money for poison so I can kill myself. I can’t live with this pain and I can’t take it anymore with my starving children,” Rukia despairs.
Where Kabul ends and the mountain begins, there is a sea of adobe houses built over the past nine years by eight hundred displaced families from Kandahar. They came to the capital fleeing fighting between international forces and the Taliban and over the years this temporary camp has become their home.
They have no drinking water or electricity, the stench is unbearable in the main arteries where the drains of each hut converge and an army of half-naked children plays among the stones. It is the poor among the poor, who have become miserable after the arrival of the emirate because they have lost the little help that came to this place. They are abandoned.
Sharifa’s family shares a courtyard with three other clans. Here, once every three days, a fire is lit to cook rice. The rest of the diet consists of dry bread, which is normally given to animals in Afghanistan, because for only 30 Afghans you can buy a kilo (0.30 euros in exchange). «We used to have temporary jobs and there were international organizations that helped us. UNICEF made the wells, others brought some food and clothing… But all this ended last year. Not only are the Taliban not helping, but they are asking the Afghan organizations not to do this with the aim of bringing us back to Kandahar. They don’t want us in Kabul,” laments Malek Aladat, the director of this camp where “the sale of girls for marriage has skyrocketed due to extreme misery.”
Child and forced marriage is an age-old practice in Afghanistan, which multiplies in economic crisis situations like the one the country is currently experiencing. The more desperate the situation of the families, the more cases increase and are becoming more extreme, as UNICEF charges, which has come in the past year to document the delivery of a baby just 20 days old.
According to UN agency data, a quarter of women between the ages of 15 and 49 are married before the age of 18. According to the country’s constitution, approved by the previous regime, the legal age for marriage is 16 for girls and 18 for boys, but the weight of the tradition of child marriage, especially in rural areas, can exceed the law. .
Fariza can’t even ask her father why he’s doing this to her. The girl is three years old. She lives a few meters from Sharifa and has also just been sold for 150,000 Afghans. “We are all home sick and we have decided to sell her before her condition deteriorates and she dies. Better to get some money now than not get any Afghan when he dies,” explains his father, Mohamed Azin, coolly.
He has two other daughters and does not rule out doing the same. In this case, the sale of the girl is a kind of guarantee to cover a loan, and if Mohamed manages to repay the amount within ten years, he will not have to relinquish Fariza. The mother doesn’t even want to hear about it and yells at her husband that she would rather die than give up the girl. The little girl has blue eyes that illuminate the interior of the mud house where they live. She plays with her sisters, oblivious to the situation in which she is the main character.
Sharifa and Fariza have given a name and a face to a sordid tragedy that has worsened since the arrival of the emirate and its consequences, including the threat of famine. While the West watches it with horror, for Afghans it is an ancestral custom that goes beyond religion, but forever marks the lives of some girls whose sales serve to temporarily alleviate families’ economic hardship. The money is spent quickly in this context, but the grief of losing a daughter is never erased, as evidenced by Rukia’s inconsolable howl as she holds Sharifa’s hand and Fariza’s mother’s muffled cry.
Source: La Verdad
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