Below, as part of International Day of the Girl, please find an
Op-ed written by Dr. Jill Biden in Time.
The
morning light shining through the window seems dull compared with the
spark I see in this young woman. Memory Banda’s voice is soft, but her
words are heard with the heavy
weight of her convictions. Only 19, she’s already made so many
life-changing choices.
We
talk about her childhood, what life was like growing up in Malawi. Her
father died when she was 4, leaving her mother to provide for her and a
younger sister. They didn’t
always have food. She recalls long nights spent hungry. This is Malawi,
where 6.5 million people—nearly 40% of the population—are food
insecure. The country has been reeling from famine since 2001.
Banda
tells me about a girl who is now twice divorced and the mother of
three. When this girl first got her period at 11, she was sent away to
an “initiation camp,” a normal
village coming-of-age ritual, where young girls, some only 9, are
taught to obey and please their future husbands. At these camps, girls
are made to have sex with a man called a “hyena”—a stranger paid to have
sex with children, oftentimes leaving them pregnant.
Some are knowingly infected with HIV or other sexually transmitted
diseases. The girls are taught that this tradition is how they become
women. The initiation is a secret that they can never share for fear of
their own and their families’ lives.
As
a mother and grandmother, as a woman, I find it difficult to understand
how this unthinkable act is a family tradition, normal and encouraged
throughout her country. The
girl Banda is telling me about is her younger sister. When she became
pregnant at 11 years old, she was married off. Banda describes her
sister’s pregnancy as motivation for what happened next.
Banda
refused to go to the initiation. She did not want to end up like her
sister: pregnant, married, uneducated. “I felt the bigger me inside,”
Banda tells me. In fact, she
never felt bigger in all her life than when she found her voice and
told her mother and all the other women in her village that she wasn’t
going to the camp. Somehow this young girl, now a woman, found the
confidence to reject family, tradition and even her
own womanhood. What was her motivation?
Banda
wanted to go to school. She wanted to live a different life, a
self-defined one. Despite her mother’s objections, Banda persevered and
is now enrolled at the University
of Malawi studying English and philosophy. Next, she aims to go to
school in the U.S. and get a master’s degree.
Every
year, tens of thousands of adolescent girls in Malawi leave school
early, because of pregnancy or marriage or simply “family reasons.”
Banda is determined to make a difference
for these girls. Mindful of her sister, she successfully lobbied the
legislature to change the law in Malawi and raise the legal age of
marriage from 15 to 18, an important difference that preserves
childhood, and time for education.
But
Banda says of all the change, she is most proud of that in her mother.
Banda’s mother now works to influence other parents, particularly
mothers, to support girls’ rights
to education and to “marry when they want.” Banda says her mother
thinks about how she could have changed her younger daughter’s life had
she said, “No, my daughter will not go to an initiation camp.”
While
Memory is unique, she is not alone. As we celebrate the International
Day of the Girl on Oct. 11, I think about all the girls and women who
have inspired me over these
past eight years. Every day, women and girls are finding incredible
confidence and taking risks. When they change one mind, pretty soon,
they have changed one tradition. That changed tradition has changed a
village. That one village has changed a country.
That new reality means new opportunities for themselves and their
daughters. But it always starts with one girl, like Memory Banda.
Source: The White House, Office of the Vice President
No comments:
Post a Comment