VOA – By Muhammad Saqib and Carol Guensburg | VOA News DISTRICT DADU, PAKISTANIn Qubra Bibi’s Pakistani family, “my father believed that it was sinful” not to marry off a daughter as soon as she could carry a heavy vessel of water to the household, she says. So, as a slender 13-year-old, Qubra was wed to a man roughly twice her age. Dodo Khan brought her to live in his family’s compound in Pir Baksh Lashari, a village in Pakistan’s southeastern province of Sindh. He needed someone to care for his ailing, widowed mother and their home.
Now 19, Qubra muses about the decisions — made by others — to end her schooling in eighth grade and set her on a course of housework and motherhood. She and Dodo have a 3-year-old daughter and baby son.
“After marriage, the responsibility of the whole house fell on me,” Qubra says, between chores such as cooking over an open fire and hanging laundry to dry. “I still cherish the desire to get an education. … When my daughter turns the proper age, then she will marry. Otherwise, how can she pursue an education?”
DISTRICT DADU, PAKISTANIn Qubra Bibi’s Pakistani family, “my father believed that it was sinful” not to marry off a daughter as soon as she could carry a heavy vessel of water to the household, she says.
So, as a slender 13-year-old, Qubra was wed to a man roughly twice her age. Dodo Khan brought her to live in his family’s compound in Pir Baksh Lashari, a village in Pakistan’s southeastern province of Sindh. He needed someone to care for his ailing, widowed mother and their home.
Now 19, Qubra muses about the decisions — made by others — to end her schooling in eighth grade and set her on a course of housework and motherhood. She and Dodo have a 3-year-old daughter and baby son.
“After marriage, the responsibility of the whole house fell on me,” Qubra says, between chores such as cooking over an open fire and hanging laundry to dry. “I still cherish the desire to get an education. … When my daughter turns the proper age, then she will marry. Otherwise, how can she pursue an education?”
Those duties and childbearing taxed her health, she says. Qubra had not reached puberty when she married and required unspecified surgery late last year when son Abdul Wahab was born prematurely.
Qubra’s mother, Mehar Bibi, was also a bride at 12 and had three children, including two sons. But now, she vows to break the family’s multigenerational cycle of child brides.
In forcing Qubra’s marriage, Mehar Bibi admits she and her husband “committed a wrong.”
“We now see education has become a necessity,” she says, speaking of her daughter and granddaughter. “We must think ahead. If a daughter is young, we must not marry her off. She must continue her education. Now we understand this.”