I traveled to Nepal in August through a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to cover child marriage in the country. Here is the two-part series I wrote for GlobalPost.
Child marriages burden young Nepalis
DOLAKHA, Nepal — Suntali Thami grew up in a tiny village here in this remote district set in the foothills of the Himalayas. Her family, destitute farmers, did not have the money to send her to school. So when she was a young girl, about the age of 13, they sent her down to the capital, Kathmandu, to earn money washing dishes at a hotel. Alone in the big city, Suntali’s life took a turn for the worse.
Within a few months, the much older hotel manager took a liking to the pretty young girl with a sweet smile and decided to marry her. Suntali did not want to marry him, she says, but she felt she had no option as it appeared to be the man’s choice.
As she talks, she sits on a straw mat outside her in-laws’ home as her baby named Durga sleeps under a blanket nearby and another baby, her niece Sita, with a head of thick, disheveled black hair, begins to cry. Suntali runs her hand through Sita’s hair as flies land around the infant’s eyes.
Suntali is among the 51 percent of Nepalese who marry as children, according to the United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
Continue reading and see the slideshow at GlobalPost.
Early marriage precludes education for young Nepalis
KATHMANDU, Nepal — When Shyam Balami was a teenager, his aging parents decided they needed more help around the house. They told him it was time to get married. They looked around and settled on a girl in a nearby village outside Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley.
Sanani was two years younger than Shyam. She came from a big family, and there was not enough money for everyone to go to school. Sanani’s parents took her out of school at age 12 and had her work in the fields and care for her younger siblings. She hoped to one day go back to school.
But that never happened.
When Shyam was about 16 and Sanani 14, their parents decided to marry the two, ending the girl’s dreams for an education and sparking a spiral of poverty that has no end in sight.
“I was very interested in education, but as soon as my marriage took place, how could I leave all this household work behind?” Sanani says as she sits insider her in-laws’ home, a mud house with a corrugated metal roof and goats tied to posts out front in Kagati village on the outskirts of the capital, Kathmandu.
Child marriage is extremely common in Nepal, which has a population of 30 million. The United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has found that 51 percent of Nepalese married as children. Nepal’s 2006 Demographic and Health Survey found that among Nepalese women age 20 to 49, 60 percent were married by the time they reached 18.
The practice has a deep impact on the educational opportunities for the country’s young. Once girls like Sanani marry they typically drop out of school to begin taking care of their in-laws’ home and start producing children. They have little opportunity to re-enroll as there are few schools in Nepal with such programs, according to Khem Karki, the executive director of SOLID Nepal, an organization that works on sexual and reproductive health.
Early marriage precludes education for young Nepalis
KATHMANDU, Nepal — When Shyam Balami was a teenager, his aging parents decided they needed more help around the house. They told him it was time to get married. They looked around and settled on a girl in a nearby village outside Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley.
Sanani was two years younger than Shyam. She came from a big family, and there was not enough money for everyone to go to school. Sanani’s parents took her out of school at age 12 and had her work in the fields and care for her younger siblings. She hoped to one day go back to school.
But that never happened.
When Shyam was about 16 and Sanani 14, their parents decided to marry the two, ending the girl’s dreams for an education and sparking a spiral of poverty that has no end in sight.
“I was very interested in education, but as soon as my marriage took place, how could I leave all this household work behind?” Sanani says as she sits insider her in-laws’ home, a mud house with a corrugated metal roof and goats tied to posts out front in Kagati village on the outskirts of the capital, Kathmandu.
Child marriage is extremely common in Nepal, which has a population of 30 million. The United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has found that 51 percent of Nepalese married as children. Nepal’s 2006 Demographic and Health Survey found that among Nepalese women age 20 to 49, 60 percent were married by the time they reached 18.
The practice has a deep impact on the educational opportunities for the country’s young. Once girls like Sanani marry they typically drop out of school to begin taking care of their in-laws’ home and start producing children. They have little opportunity to re-enroll as there are few schools in Nepal with such programs, according to Khem Karki, the executive director of SOLID Nepal, an organization that works on sexual and reproductive health.