Never never be born a girl in Afghanistan. Never.
A girl who says she is nine years old was captured at a checkpoint in Afghanistan wearing a suicide vest. The BBC reports her story as she told it.
It was late evening, the mullah was calling for prayers and my brother took me outside and told me to put on this vest. He showed me how to operate it, and I said: “I can’t – what if it doesn’t work?” And he said: ‘It will, don’t worry.’
I was scared and he took the vest back from me and he hit me hard, and I felt scared. Then [he gave me back the vest and] left me near the checkpoint where he said I had to operate it.
She wandered off and slept in the desert that night, and in the morning a soldier from the checkpoint found her.
When I told the commander my story he told me to go back home and I said: “No, they beat me there and I am not treated well.”
He said: “OK, well if you’re not going home then we have to take you to the provincial capital.” That’s when they brought me [to Lashkar Gah and] I spoke to another commander, the senior commander, and that’s how I come to be here.
Even if the government says it will guarantee my safety I am not going back – the same thing will happen again. They told me: “If you don’t do it this time, we will make you do it again.”
That’s a loving family she has.
My father came here and told me to go back and I said: “No, I will kill myself rather than go with you.”
I don’t have a mother, I have a stepmother and she was not very nice to me.
I did everything at home. I cooked, I made bread, I washed clothes, I cleaned the whole house and they still weren’t happy – they would treat me badly, as if I was a slave.
I didn’t go to school because they didn’t let me. I can’t read a word, I can’t pronounce anything. It’s because I wasn’t taught – nobody taught me how… of course I want to go to school.
My brother told me: “You’re here in this world and you will die. You are not here to learn or to do other things or to expect that your word will carry any weight. You are here just to die and do your duty.”
Never, never, never be born a girl in Afghanistan.
Well, if they’re going to keep blowing up their nine year old girls because they’re too cowardly to blow themselves up, then just being born period, in Afghanistan, is going to start being a problem.
Have you ever felt the joy of teaching a child something? I’m not a parent or a teacher but I have nieces and nephews who are curious about all the things. I know a fair amount of stuff and they ask me questions. Their excitement – their sheer gibbering excitement – when they suddenly understand something complicated is enough to leave me on the verge of tears. They actually save questions up for when they see me, which is the most flattering thing I can imagine.
I don’t understand how anyone who has experienced that could leave dark the mind of a child.
I know this thread is about unimaginably worse abuse than that, but the fact that – despite every other horribleness inflicted upon her – she seems to count the barrier to education as equally bad is especially heartbreaking.
What sort of authority revels in denying the joy of children to learn or adults to teach?
Or warps people so badly that they force little girls to blow themselves and others up of course. Let’s just say I cried about this story for at least two reasons.
And they’ll send her back, of course.