10. Confident As A Girl

“Did you hear?”, Fana asks while chasing an escaped goat.

“What?” asks Behati, but Fana is too far.

“Heard about what?” she asks, gaining on Fana while holding her schoolbooks tightly.

“About Desta and you?”, Fana calls out and catches the runaway goat around its neck.

Desta is a 16-year-old boy who lives in the next village. Behati has seen him on a few family gatherings, but never actually spoken to him, as he is two years older than her.

“What about us?” Behati asks again and is starting to grow annoyed.

“You are going to marry,” Fana whispers and starts giggling, as if talking about marriage was something funny.

“We are not,” Behati shouts out loudly enough to scare the goat which bolts off over the field again. Fana stops her chase and looks at Behati with wide eyes.

“Didn’t your father tell you? He invited my parents to the wedding next week,” Fana tells her, and Behati grows cold.

She knows that her parents have often talked about marriage, but she had thought that she would still have time. She was only in the eighth grade. She cannot marry now. That would mean that she could no longer go to school. That she would have to have children herself. Behati turns on the spot and runs straight home to her parents, ignoring Fana’s cries behind her. When she reaches her hut, she finds her father behind it.

“Father!” Behati yells at him angrily and he turns surprised.

“Is it true, that I am to marry next week?”

He stops the ox and sighs. “Yes. It is time!”

Then she gathers all the courage she has and focuses on what she has learned in school. To be confident as a girl. “You know that you are endangering my life, making me marry this early?”

“Behati, we will strengthen our family ties with this marriage. It is tradition,” he argues.

“Yes, tradition. But what about my education? What about my health? Do you want me to die while giving birth? Do you want me to bleed to death because my baby comes early?” Behati grows louder with every argument.

Her father is still for a moment.

“You remember Nuru? She married at 12. Her first babies died when she was 14 and 15. Then she died when she was 16 and pregnant again. Do you want this for me? I want to continue school.” She stares at her father and braces for his refusal. But he nods slowly.

“Of course, I don’t want that for you,” he says. That day Behati did not become one of 15 million child brides in Ethiopia.