In a sprawling settlement of mud brick huts in western Afghanistan housing people displaced by drought and war, a woman is fight-ing to save her daughter.
Aziz Gul’s husband sold the 10-year-old girl into marriage without telling his wife, taking a down-payment so he could feed his family of five children. Without that money, he told her, they would all starve. He had to sacrifice one to save the rest.
Many of Afghanistan’s growing number of destitute people are making desperate decisions such as these as their nation spirals into a vortex of poverty.
The aid-dependent country’s econ-omy was already teetering when the Taliban seized power in mid-August amid a chaotic withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops. The in-ternational community froze Af-ghanistan’s assets abroad and halted all funding, unwilling to work with a Taliban government given its reputation for brutality during its previous rule 20 years ago.
The consequences have been devas-tating for a country battered by four decades of war, a punishing drought and the coronavirus pan-demic. Legions of state employees, including doctors, haven’t been paid in months. Malnutrition and poverty stalk the most vulnerable, and aid groups say more than half the population faces acute food shortages.
“Day by day, the situation is dete-riorating in this country, and espe-cially children are suffering,” said Asuntha Charles, national director of the World Vision aid organiza-tion in Afghanistan, which runs a health clinic for displaced people just outside the western city of Herat.
“Today I have been heartbroken to see that the families are willing to sell their children to feed other family members,” Charles said. “So it’s the right time for the humani-tarian community to stand up and stay with the people of Afghani-stan.”
Arranging marriages for very young girls is a frequent practice through-out the region. The groom’s family – often distant relatives – pays money to seal the deal, and the child usu-ally stays with her own parents un-til she is at least around 15 or 16. Yet with many unable to afford even basic food, some say they’d allow prospective grooms to take very young girls or are even trying to sell their sons.
But Gul, unusually in this deeply patriarchal, male-dominated soci-ety, is resisting. Married off herself at 15, she says she would kill herself if her daughter, Qandi Gul, is forci-bly taken away.
Gul remembers well the moment she found out her husband had sold Qandi. For around two months, the family had been able to eat. Even-tually, she asked her husband where the money came from, and he told her.
“My heart stopped beating. I wished I could have died at that time, but maybe God didn’t want me to die,” Gul said. Qandi sat close to her mother, her hazel eyes peer-ing shyly from beneath her sky-blue headscarf. “Each time I remember that night…I die and come back to life. It was so difficult.”
She asked her husband why he did it. “He said he wanted to sell one and save the others. ‘You all would have died this way,’ (he said.) I told him, ‘Dying was much better than what you have done.’”
Gul rallied her community, telling her brother and village elders that her husband had sold her child be-hind her back. They supported her, and with their help she secured a “divorce” for her child, but only on condition she repays the 100,000 afghanis (about $1,000) that her husband received.—Agencies
