RAPTI SONARI, Nepal – Sapana has dreamed of becoming a government official. The 17-year-old lights a single solar lamp that hangs from the ceiling and hits the books every night in her hut along a bumpy dirt road, and plans a future that is very different from her mother’s.
But when the coronavirus crawled through Nepal and closed the schools, Sapana lost focus. Stuck in her town with little to do, she struck up a friendship with an employee who was not working.
They fell in love. Soon they were married. Now Sapana has given up her professional dreams without intending to return to school.
“Things might have been different if I had not stopped my studies,” Sapana said recently as she sat breastfeeding her 2-month-old son on the floor of her simple home. Her family name was withheld to protect her privacy.
What happened to Sapana in a small town in Nepal happens to girls in the developing world. The United Nations says marriage is on the rise in many places at a worrying level, and the coronavirus pandemic is hindering years of hard-earned progress in keeping young women in school.
In a report released on Monday, the United Nations Children’s Fund predicted that ten years later, another ten million girls would be at risk of child marriage, which was defined as a union 18 years ago. Henrietta Fore, UNICEF’s executive director, said that ‘Covid -19 has made an already difficult situation for millions of girls even worse. ‘
“Covid-19 has definitely degraded us,” said Nankali Maksud, a senior adviser at UNICEF.
In some cases, young girls are forced by parents or other authority figures to marry older men. Child advocates are also concerned about the young women who, due to the impact of the pandemic, are being driven away from school and regarded early marriages as their only option, abandoning their ambitions for an education and a better life.
Many child marriages are never registered. UNICEF estimates that 650 million girls and women still living today were married in childhood. Advocates for children say they are seeing a boom in places where it has long been a problem, such as India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia and Malawi, where teenage pregnancies have tripled in some areas.
In Nepal, where the legal age for marriage is 20, the situation seems particularly sharp. The problems associated with the country and at present make it difficult for many young women to avoid early marriages.
One of the poorest countries in Asia, Nepal, relies on overpayments and tourism. The pandemic devastated both. Usually, at this time of year, foreign tourists trek up the mountains to begin expensive treks in the Annapurna range and up the slopes of Mount Everest. This year, the money flowing out of it has almost dried up in so many layers of the Nepalese economy.
Millions of workers from Nepal work abroad, often as cooks, cleaners, maids, guards and caretakers in India or the Middle East. In 2019, Nepal will earn $ 8.25 billion from foreign payments. But because most of the world economies have hurt, the overpayment flow has also slowed. Legions of young Nepalese men, many of whom are single, have recently returned home.
Many others lost their jobs in the cities of Nepal. Quite a number of young men now wander bored and broken in their villages along the mountains. This is how Sapana meets her husband, Hardas.
Hardas, who said he was about twenty, had previously worked as a travel mason, often in cities such as Kathmandu and Nepal. But after being released in April, at the start of the pandemic, he returned to his native Rapti Sonari, a small town of about 10,000 people, 300 kilometers west of Kathmandu.
The houses are scattered in a maze of dirt roads under the hills. Most are of mud and stone. Sapana’s father, Ram Dayal, bought a car rickshaw before the closure struck. Now he has monthly payments of 30,000 rupees, about $ 250, and almost no customers.
Mr. Dayal was not happy that his daughter married so young, but he admitted that her financial relief left the house. He has five other mouths to feed.
“She would have had a better life if she had completed the 10th grade,” said Mr. Dayal said.
Ghumni, his wife and Sapana’s mother, agreed. She was also a child bride and eventually had four children and no education.
Activists fighting child marriage say they are working in the most difficult circumstances they have ever faced, even if the problem is exacerbated. Nepal has imposed strict restrictions on vehicle movements. As infections increased, activists like everyone else indoors were restricted. Several said the number of child marriages in their areas doubled or nearly doubled during the pandemic.
“We are at the first point,” said Hira Khatri, an activist against children and marriage in the district, which includes Rapti Sonari.
Two years ago, Ms. Khatri said, she intervened and stopped seven child marriages in her town. It did not make her popular. Many families in Nepal are eager to marry their young daughters. Some villagers threatened to kill her, Ms. Khatri said and they threw used condoms outside her house to humiliate her.
The police did not help much. The officers in towns were much more focused on enforcing quarantine rules and monitoring virus cases. Some police officers expressed their reluctance to get involved.
“These are serious criminal charges,” said Om Bahadur Rana, a police officer in Nepalgunj. “If we file a lawsuit over child marriage, it could hurt young people’s chances of ever getting a job in government.”
Across Central Nepal, many families have told stories of seeing their daughters disappear in early marriages.
Mayawati, 17, who also lives in Rapti Sonari, dreamed of studying agriculture. But the struggles of her family during the pandemic made her feel guilty because she was a burden to her parents. She left her school and then married a man who worked as a laborer. Her dreams also slipped away quietly.
“We have no money,” said Mayawati, whose surname was also withheld. “How was I supposed to continue my studies?”
Mayawati said most of her friends who got married during the closing ceremony were now pregnant.
Some people in Nepal feel strongly about what they consider to be the benefits of child marriage. Several elders in the Madhesi community, based on the southern plains near the border with India, have said they have falsified their daughters’ birth certificates so as not to get into trouble.
“Marrying daughters at a young age made me happier. This is our practice, ”said Mina Kondu. She said she recently doctored her 16-year-old daughter’s birth certificate. It looks like she’s 19, who was still under legal age, but close enough, the family believes.
“The police can not stop us,” she said.
Ms Kondu, who lives about three hours’ drive from Sapana’s in a village, said that if the families did not arrange for their daughters to marry young, the daughters would do so without permission and dishonor the family.
Sapana’s family has accepted her recent marriage. In the span of a few months, Sapana studied from school to her baby and her new husband.
She collects grass to feed the family’s four buffaloes.
She was clothes.
She cooks rice and flatbread.
“I could not complete my studies, that’s true,” she said. “My son will do it.”
And then she added for a moment, “Hopefully he’ll get married when he grows up.”
Bhadra Sharma reports from Rapti Sonari, Nepal, and Jeffrey Gettleman from New Delhi.