By Haniya Frotan
Her cracked lips seemed to scream the wounds of her life. Blood seeped from the fissures in her parched skin, and her eyes, like two deep hollows, had sunken into her thin, worn face.
Twenty-five-year-old Ayesha* said in a trembling voice,
“If it weren’t for my children, I would have ended this life long ago.”
She lives in the Ettefaq township of west Kabul, where most residents struggle with extreme poverty, and life has been reduced to a daily battle for survival.
Ayesha, who was sold as a child and married off at the age of 12 to an addicted man, now stands at the edge of a heart-wrenching decision: to sell her child to escape starvation.
A child sold
Ayesha’s story is a bitter tale. She says that in the year 2001, when she was just one year old, she lost her mother to illness. Her father, a farmer in the Waras district of Bamyan, was unable to care for her and her older brother.
A relative of Ayesha, speaking to Rukhshana Media on condition of anonymity, said her father sold her to a landowner in exchange for a few seers of wheat.
According to her relative, Ayesha’s father justified his decision by saying, “She has no mother; I can’t manage two small children.” He took his son with him and handed Ayesha over to his employer in exchange for 50 KGs of wheat. He later moved to Kabul, remarried, and from that day on, never looked back or asked about Ayesha.
Life in her new family brought Ayesha nothing but suffering. Holding back tears, she recalls,
“The best clothes were for my stepsisters. They went to school, but I was just the house servant. If I made a mistake, my stepmother would beat me and say, ‘We bought you to work—you have to earn your keep.”
Forced marriage and the cycle of violence
In the autumn of 2012, when Ayesha was only 12 years old, her stepfather made yet another decision for her. He sold her for 100,000 Afghanis ($1500) to a 28-year-old man addicted to drugs.
“I was just a child; I didn’t understand anything about life. I didn’t even know what it meant to be an addict,” she says.
“The neighbors would say, ‘You’ve become the wife of a drug addict,’ but I didn’t understand what that meant.”
Her husband’s family, fully aware of his addiction, had hoped that marriage would cure him, but that hope never came true.
Not only did Ayesha’s husband fail to quit drugs, but his behavior grew increasingly violent. By the third year of their marriage, he would often not come home at night, and he began pressuring Ayesha to provide money for his drugs.
“He didn’t work. I had to find a way to feed myself and my one-year-old daughter. I worked in restaurants, washed clothes, looked after other people’s children. But my husband tortured me. He would press hot metal rods against my feet, shove sticks under my fingernails, and scream, ‘Confess! You’re seeing other men!’”
Ayesha thought about escaping many times, but with a small child, she had nowhere to go.
“Where could I go? Who would take me in? I had no choice but to endure,” she says.
Escape to Kabul and the shadow of an addicted husband
In the summer of 2021, following the collapse of Afghanistan’s previous government, Ayesha lost her job at a restaurant in Bamyan. With her two daughters, she fled to Kabul, hoping to escape her addicted husband and find a better life.
By day, Ayesha worked in the fields; by night, she did beadwork. With her meager income, she had managed to build a relatively peaceful life for herself and her children. But this peace was short-lived. A year later, her husband found her, and the cycle of violence began again.
“He beat me so badly that there wasn’t a part of my body left unbruised. He didn’t have money for drugs, so he took it from me by force and threats,” she says.
“He said, ‘If you don’t give me money, I’ll go to the authorities and tell them you ran away from home.’”
Her husband turned to stealing from their home, selling Ayesha’s belongings, including her mobile phone and sewing machine, which was her only source of income. Two months ago, he came home for the last time, took the remaining items, and disappeared.
On the brink of a terrifying decision
Now, Ayesha lives with her four children, aged nine, six, and one-year-old twins, in a damp, dark house in the Ettefaq township of western Kabul. The wooden ceiling is covered in cobwebs, and the worn carpet on the floor smells musty from excessive moisture.
