By Elyas Ahmadi anf Behzad Sadiq
Gul Bibi’s life took an abrupt turn after her 13th birthday. She had been living the carefree of a child in the Arghandab district of Kandahar province when her family decided to marry her off to her 50-year-old brother-in-law, Abdul Nabi, who had been widowed after Gul Bibi’s sister died. “I had no idea what it was to be married,” Gul Bibi recalls. That was more than 37 years ago.
Gul Bibi’s story is not unique. Many women in her community are forced to marry at a young age. This tradition continued as she married off her own daughters during their childhood. Gul Bibi and her husband made an exchange deal, known as Badal, to marry off their children, but she regrets it. “Mokhi pa makhi mo tabaa swala,” she says in Pashto, which means, “We are ruined by the exchange deal.”
Gul Bibi gave birth to her first healthy child at 17 years old. “Then two or three more passed away due to premature birth. Then God gave me three more children.” But not long after her fourth child was born, tragedy struck. Her husband Abdul Nabi became paralyzed and died eight months later. Gul Bibi was only 23 years old. “One day I was out, and when I returned home, my husband had died,” she says. “The villagers bathed his body in the mosque and buried it.”
Abdul Nabi had worked as a daily laborer, plowing fields to provide for their family. Following their father’s death, Gul Bibi’s older son, Farid Ahmad, and later her second son, Sayed Ahmad, began working in the fields to help the family income. She remembers this time as the only relatively good period in her life. “Of all the days, they were good days. Either they worked in the vineyard, or they worked on the poppy field, tapping opium, or they worked on the melon field.”
But the brief respite ended when her sons were killed on the same day less than two years ago in separate Taliban attacks. She struggles to tell the story, struggling to hold back her tears. “Farid Ahmad, [29], was martyred in an explosion in Arghandab district at the end of the fall of the previous government. Sayed Ahmad, [21], had gone to bring his brother’s body, but they blew up his car on the way. He was also martyred. We buried both of them on the same day.”
“A fire burns in my heart from pain,” she says, saying her house suddenly felt very empty after their deaths.
Now over 50 years old, Gul Bibi is responsible for feeding 14 people by begging alone. “Every day I come to the city and beg,” she says. “Sometimes someone gives me bran that animals eat, and I take it home for the children to eat.”
Of the people she has to feed, seven are her grandchildren from her sons. Four girls and two boys from Farid Ahmad, and one child from Sayed Ahmad who was born after his death.
Her two daughters-in-law, who were widowed when her sons were killed, have suffered terribly. Sayed Ahmad’s wife, Gul Pari, died not long after him, also at 29. Gul Pari’s brothers forcibly separated her from her child and married her to another man, who had two children already. She died six months later, but Gul Bibi does not know the details of how.
While Farid Ahmad’s wife, Siddiqa, still lives with Gul Bibi, she was paralysed after her husband’s death in apparent shock. Doctors say its treatable, but because of their financial situation, they have not gotten treatment. “I don’t have the money to treat her,” Gul Bibi says.
Gul Bibi’s own daughters, Gulalai and Rabia, were forced to marry as children as part of an exchange so their brothers could get married. Gulalai was 17 and Rabia was 14 at the time.
One of her daughter’s husband’s has gone missing, so Gul Bibi is supporting her and the children. “I am her and her four children’s guardian,” she says.
But thankfully for Gul Bibi, one of her daughter’s is faring okay with enough food and income to support her own family, although it doesn’t stretch very far. “They don’t have anything to help us,” Gul Bibi says. “Her husband is a laborer. They are still happy.”
Farid Ahmad’s 14-year-old daughter, Siddiqa, {same name as her mother} may soon face a similar fate as the generations of women before her because before his death, Farid Ahmad promised Siddiqa in exchange for a bride for his son, now only nine-years-old. Gul Bibi is unhappy with the deal, but feels powerless to change it.
None of the women in Gul Bibi’s family have ever attended school or been allowed to have a say in their futures. The only time Gul Bibi is permitted by various social norms to engage with the community is when she is begging to feed her family. She leaves her house in Sarband every morning with a heavy heart and hungry stomach, traveling to Kandahar city to beg for food and money.
She goes from shop to shop, street to street, reaching out to passers-by, begging, collects everything edible that is given to her and taking it home, even the animal bran. “I often roam Nasaji area. I take whatever they give me,” she says, but doesn’t eat anything for herself. “Someone gives chocolate, someone gives flour, someone gives sweets, someone gives salt, someone gives 10-20 afghanis, I collect it all, and I return home while fasting.”
These days during Ramadan, Gul Bibi reaches her house in Sarband before sunset to break her fast with the people under her supervision. Otherwise, she says, all those others relying on her may starve.
