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This Father’s Day I would like to bring to your attention an issue which I personally wasn’t aware of until recently. The child grooms in Nepal. I am sure many of you have read about the child brides of certain areas of the world but in Nepal boys are also brought into this marriage at a young age, so instead of just a grown man with a young girl, it is a young boy and young girl being forced into marriage. In Nepal young boys and girls are almost proportional to each other. Check out the stats below.
There are quite a few touching stories about the young grooms of Nepal. One such story is that of Pannilal Yadav.
He was wed at the age of 8 to a girl at the age of 7. His wife was Rajkumari. The marriage started out with his wife living with her family and visiting every so often. Until the third of three ceremonies brought Rajkumari into Pannilal’s family’s home. For years the two hardly spoke, too shy to talk to one another.
At the age of 14 Pannilal went on a field trip and while there saw a rock, “On a big rock I saw painted the words “I love you.” I asked my teacher what the words meant. He said the rock was a place where young people meet secretly and say things like that. “You cannot understand, Pannilal,” he said. “They are not married young like you.”.
One of the most detrimental side effects of child marriage is both participants educations are cut short. Rajkumari left school at 7 while Pannilal had to leave school with the birth of their first child, tenth grade. With dreams of becoming and engineer and pulling himself out of the poverty at home he instead is pulled into a similar cycle as what led to his parents poverty. “Today Rajkumari and I have four children. I work as a community organizer trying to educate people in Nepal about how harmful child marriage is. She stays at home with our children and is very glad that I am working to stop child marriage. She once told me, “It would have been nice if I was married to you when I was big enough to understand what it really means to be together.”
Rajkumari is a member of CARE’s Tipping Point initiative. This initiative works in an innovative way through insight, analysis, learning, and influence through advocacy. This influences change-makers and addresses root causes of child marriage in Nepal and Bangladesh, two child marriage hotspots.
I would suggest checking out CARE’s site for more information and also please sign the petition and share it with your friends.
hey thanks for the post ,i have never heard of this before in my life,this is so sad and unfair.Children have a right to enjoy their childhood.