Khalida's father says she's 9—or maybe 10. As much as Sayed Shah loves his 10 children, the functionally illiterate Afghan farmer can't keep track of all their birth dates. Khalida huddles at his side, trying to hide beneath her chador and headscarf. They both know the family can't keep her much longer. Khalida's father has spent much of his life raising opium, as men like him have been doing for decades in the stony hillsides of eastern Afghanistan and on the dusty southern plains. It's the only reliable cash crop most of those farmers ever had. Even so, Shah and his family barely got by: traffickers may prosper, but poor farmers like him only subsist. Now he's losing far more than money. 'I never imagined I'd have to pay for growing opium by giving up my daughter,' says Shah.
The family's heartbreak began when Shah borrowed $2,000 from a local trafficker, promising to repay the loan with 24 kilos of opium at harvest time. Late last spring, just before harvest, a government crop-eradication team appeared at the family's little plot of land in Laghman province and destroyed Shah's entire two and a half acres of poppies. Unable to meet his debt, Shah fled with his family to Jalalabad, the capital of neighboring Nangarhar province. The trafficker found them anyway and demanded his opium. So Shah took his case before a tribal council in Laghman and begged for leniency. Instead, the elders unanimously ruled that Shah would have to reimburse the trafficker by giving Khalida to him in marriage. Now the family can only wait for the 45-year-old drugrunner to come back for his prize. Khalida wanted to be a teacher someday, but that has become impossible. 'It's my fate,' the child says.
This story really bothered me today. Girls as young as 2 months old are being traded to keep the rest of the family safe when a loan is defaulted. Sometimes the husband-to-be waits to take the bride until she is of marriageable age. Sometimes the girl goes to the man's home and is a servant in the intervening years. If the family is lucky, there may be a bride price paid on top of forgiving the loan, following the custom of a dowry given to the bride's family. But most, having made the loan to keep their family from starving, don't see much choice (although I don't agree with that). Some of the young brides choose suicide over marriage. These aren't people who do not love their daughters; they see it as a sacrifice for the greater good of the family, of being between a rock and a hard place. It brings a loss of honour to the girl and to her family to go through one of these marriages, but it is deemed necessary given that lives could be lost.
I know it's a different culture, one in which women and girls are little more than chattel. Change, if it happens, will really have to come from within that culture. But it's times like these I feel fortunate to have been born in a country where women have so many more advantages, maybe not in relation to men, but certainly in relation to those in some other countries.
I think it's sad that a girl's entire future has been taken out of her hands, as in the case of Khalida, and even sadder that the number of stories like Khalida's is growing, and that thousands of young women are opium brides. I suppose in some cases their lives may get better, at least in terms of standard of living, since the traffickers often do better than the farmers. But as the article points out, even the traffickers are struggling. Should the government stop its opium eradication programme? Of course not. But it should offer more support for alternative crops to fill the vacuum, and it should outlaw forced marriages. The government is at least talking about the practice. President Hamid Karzai said in a recent speech:
I call on the people [not to] give their daughters for money; they shouldn't give them to old men, and they shouldn't give them in forced marriages.
Now if he can only back up those words with action.
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