Joanita has a lost look, a half-smile, 15 years old and girlish gestures.
She speaks Makua and a little Portuguese, but little.
Her hair is perfectly gathered in very small braids and combed back.
She is dressed in a red t-shirt and a capulana of a thousand colors, the traditional fabric that Mozambican women wear in rural areas as if they were skirts.
Joanita went to school.
But only until she appeared “someone who came and said she wanted to get married.”
The man approached her for several days after school.
He insisted that they live together.
She was 14 years old, and she ended up accepting.
He doesn't know how to explain why he wanted to join her life with that of a stranger much older than her, but he does know that everything went wrong from the beginning.
She tells it slowly and anguished:
—He locked me in his house for more than a month.
She wouldn't let me go out, not even to go see my family.
But I didn't know how to cook, or run a house, or understand what I had to do.
I felt kidnapped.
He didn't treat me well.
Then, when I got pregnant, one day she left and never came back.
Little Eridmilson, four months old, now hangs all day from the babyish chest of Joanita, who returned to her family's house asking for help because she could not take care of the baby.
Not even of herself.
PHOTO GALLERY: A day with Joanita
Joanita sleeps in a bed of wood and straw with her four-month-old baby, Eridimilson.Samuel Sánchez
Seven people live in the house: Joanita, her mother and the baby, and Joanita's four siblings, ages 5 to 14.
The pantry consists of two bags of dried cassava.Samuel Sánchez
Joanita and her mother, Casilda, prepare a fire in one of the rooms of the house, which does not have a kitchen.
Here they make cooked ground manioc, the basis of their diet.Samuel Sánchez
The house, made of straw and adobe, is recently built.
The previous one was devastated by a cyclone, a frequent phenomenon in Nampula.Samuel Sánchez
Joanita goes to the well to collect water for the family.
For food, they depend on what their neighbors give them.Samuel Sánchez
A water tank and a well built by Unicef have changed the life of the town.
Women and girls do not have to waste hours of their day going to the river for water.Samuel Sánchez
The town of Joanita was part of an old cotton plantation.
That is why it has a hospital, which today is used as a health center, which was built by the owners of the European company that managed the plantation.Samuel Sánchez
The cyclones have left their mark on the town school.
Some classrooms have destroyed walls.
Joanita's dream is to return to school as soon as possible.Samuel Sánchez
Joanita wants to be a doctor or nurse.
She says she never wants to get married again.Samuel Sánchez
Casilda, her mother, is a 29-year-old grandmother.
And she explains what Joanita is not able to put words to: that one of the main reasons why girls get married is the extreme poverty that surrounds them.
They want to try to get out of it any way they can.
Even marrying an older, unknown man.
Some admit that when they started menstruating they started “looking for men” to get ahead.
In other cases, it is the families who force them, for the same reason: so that the husband helps them all financially and so that they have one less mouth to feed.
Sometimes they are also forced to marry because they have become pregnant.
Casilda and Joanita live in Miserepane, in the Monapo district of Nampula, northern Mozambique.
In her town, the water doesn't come out of the tap, you have to go get it from the well.
Food cannot be bought in the supermarket, it must be grown and collected in the fields.
There is no latrine in their adobe and straw house, which they had to build recently because the previous one was destroyed by a cyclone, something quite common.
And there is no kitchen, no gas, no electricity.
To boil the freshly ground dried cassava, a staple food for the whole family, they have to make a fire in one of the three minimum rooms of the house, which houses seven people: the two of them, the baby Eridmilson and the four brothers. Joanita's little ones.
Meeting basic needs, eating and drinking, requires many hours and a lot of effort in this part of the world.
“Now, also, since I have to take care of the baby, I can't go to the
mashamba
(the land he cultivates, more than an hour away on foot) or to work at the cashew processing plant, and we don't have food,” he laments. Casilda.
“We depend on what the neighbors give us.
We don't have clothes.
The house we live in is not good.
I am very tired of this sadness.
We survived thank God.”
Mozambique is the fifth country in the world with the highest rate of child marriage.
Almost one in two women between the ages of 18 and 24 married as a minor, according to data from UNICEF, an organization with which we traveled to several communities where they develop programs to try to eradicate these practices.
The highest percentages are in the north: in the province of Cabo Delgado and in Nampula, where Joanita lives.
They are, precisely, the poorest.
Life expectancy in the region is 53 years.
Older people are hardly seen in the villages.
The country is an example of a global evil.
Today there are 650 million women and girls in the world who were married before turning 18.
They are one in six.
And every year 12 million more do it, according to figures managed by UNICEF.
The highest rates are in sub-Saharan Africa (between 32 and 40%, depending on the area), in South Asia (28%) and in Latin America (21%).
There are social and cultural reasons for child marriage, of course, and even others related to climate change or the effects of the pandemic, but poverty cuts through them all.
The four countries that surpass Mozambique in the percentage of this type of unions are Niger, the Central African Republic, Chad and Mali, all African and among the poorest states in the world.
“In poor countries and communities, furthermore, any unforeseen event affects and can increase the number of premature unions,” explains Nankali Maksud, coordinator of the global program of the United Nations Population Fund and UNICEF to end child marriage.
“For example, cyclones.
When there is no functioning welfare state, if schools and homes are destroyed, families look for solutions.
And one of them is to marry off their daughters to guarantee new income.
The same thing happens with humanitarian crises.
Many times adolescent girls are married to protect them, so that they go somewhere else.
We must accelerate and address this problem from all angles, because it affects not only girls, but the entire society: gender equality, premature pregnancies, infant and child mortality, sexist violence , to education… and causes a community to have fewer resources to escape poverty.”
Child marriage should be eradicated in 2030 according to the Sustainable Development Goals approved in September 2015 by the UN – known as Agenda 2030 – but many countries are still very far from achieving it and it does not seem that they will do so in the next seven years.
UNICEF rather warns that, at the current rate, it would take 300. Michelle Obama, Melinda Gates and Amal Clooney issued a call last December in Malawi and South Africa for urgent action and their three organizations have joined forces to work together on this subject.
Belita is 17 years old and lives with her three-year-old son Albertino at her sister's house in Monapo (Mozambique).
When she was 14 she married an older man who abused her.
She dreams of going back to school.Samuel Sánchez
Jail for anyone who marries a minor
More and more countries prohibit marriage before the age of 18.
And some of them, like Mozambique, include them in the Penal Code.
Since July 2019, marrying minors is punishable by prison sentences of 8 to 12 years.
And up to one year in prison can be imposed on those who organize or support these unions.
Having sexual relations between a minor and an adult is punishable by imprisonment of two to eight years.
And, if the girl becomes pregnant or contracts a sexually transmitted disease, the sentence imposed is at least eight years.
Minors cannot marry each other either, although in this case it is prohibited, not punished.
The law is clear and tough.
The Government and the different administrations are very aware of the problem.
There are numerous plans and initiatives underway, talks, health, socioeconomic, educational, labor, police, and judicial interventions.
UNICEF carries out programs against child marriage in the provinces of Nampula, Zambezia and Sofala, in collaboration with local NGOs, and will develop them this year in Cabo Delgado.
But it is not so easy to end a practice that affects half of women.
You can't even put half the country in jail.
It is a task, above all, of social and family awareness.
Teenage girls speak: these are their stories
Girls of 13 and 14 in Mozambique are very girls.
They are not particularly developed, and most are very short and thin.
Many of them look much smaller than a Spanish teenager.
There is no hunger in the country, but there are many areas with chronic malnutrition.
Some of these teenagers have been victims of abuse from a very young age, without even understanding what was happening to them.
While their husbands demanded that they be women and behave as such, they still wore t-shirts with drawings of minions.
—My name is Mendina.
The man I married worked at the port, in Nacala, but he used to come to my town.
He convinced me by saying that he could continue studying, that he would help me.
I accepted because we don't have good living conditions here, we are very poor, and I wanted to go to school.
Then I got pregnant, and the baby died shortly after.
I was 14 years old;
he, 23. I was small and weak.
I couldn't wash clothes or do housework.
He made me do a lot of things.
He hit me.
He insulted me.
It was very violent.
Then I got pregnant again and he started hitting me more and telling me that the baby wasn't his.
In the end he ended up leaving and I haven't seen him again.
I returned to my town.
Now I live with my daughter Yumina, who is one year old, in my sister's house and her five children.
PHOTO GALLERY: “I got married when I was 14”
Belita is 17 years old.
She married an older man at 14 who mistreated her.Samuel Sánchez
He now lives with his three-year-old son Albertino at his sister's house.Samuel Sánchez
Joanita also married at the age of 14, with a man who approached her after school.Samuel Sánchez
She has returned to her mother's house with her baby, Eridimilson, four months old.Samuel Sánchez
Enjulta is 16 years old.
She married at 15. Samuel Sánchez
He has returned to live with his grandmother.
His son, Danildo, is barely a month old.Samuel Sánchez
Mendina is 17 years old.
She married at 14 to an older man who beat her while she was pregnant.
Her first child died.Samuel Sánchez
With his one-year-old daughter Yumina, he now lives at his sister's house and close to his parents.Samuel Sánchez
Ersane is 16 years old.
She married 15.Samuel Sánchez
He lives again with his family and with his four-month-old baby, Venicio.Samuel Sánchez
Esmeralda is 17 years old.
She married a boy she liked and who was of legal age, at 16.Samuel Sánchez
He is back at the family home.
She wants to be a nurse.Samuel Sánchez
Gelsea is 16 years old.
She married at 15.Samuel Sánchez
Their baby, Osvalda, is seven months old.
Like the rest, Gelsea wants to return to school as soon as possible.Samuel Sánchez
Next to Mendina are her parents, Ricardo and Angelina.
Like so many families, they did not previously know that it was forbidden for minors to marry.
Now they know.
Still, when asked why they favored that wedding, they sigh and point around them, showing the poverty of their houses, the half-fallen thatched roofs that let in some of the water when it rains, the scarcity of almost everything.
“You see how we live,” Ricardo defends himself.
“We thought our lives would improve with the wedding.
What were we going to do?”
They narrate their day to day.
How they get up at 3 in the morning to go cultivate their fields, which are about 10 kilometers away.
How they spend there all day until around 12, when the sun is shining and the heat cannot be tolerated.
How they then send the girls to the river, which is about a 40-minute walk away, to fill huge buckets with water that they collect from some puddles that form along the shore and that they carry back to the town on their heads.
In the river they also wash their clothes, put them to dry, and bathe.
When they go to school, they are often late and the girls are already so tired that they fall asleep.
Ricardo and Angelina emphasize that they are now aware that Mendina has to study and that she should not have gotten married, but they say that, in the difficult conditions in which they live, each one does what they can.
Belita was also beaten and humiliated by her husband.
It's a pattern: twenty-somethings marrying 14-year-olds and then getting angry and telling them that they don't know how to be good wives.
“One day my husband came home and asked me what I had cooked,” she remembers.
“When I told him nothing, he beat me up.
I was pregnant".
This man also ended up disappearing when the baby, Albertino, was born.
Belita now lives with her sister and she survives by making cookies and cooked cassava with tomato sauce and selling it in the town.
PHOTO GALLERY: Food and water
Mendina lives in a town without running water or a well.
Every day she has to go to the nearest river to pick her up, a half-hour walk away.Samuel Sánchez
She and her brothers fill large buckets with the water they collect in puddles that form on the banks of the river.Samuel Sánchez
Mendina spends a large part of the day collecting water and cultivating the land.Samuel Sánchez
Communities without water use rivers to bathe and to wash and dry clothes.Samuel Sánchez
Ersane gets up at dawn to go to the 'mashamba', the family plot he cultivates, an hour's walk away.Samuel Sánchez
He leaves at dawn and is usually there until 12, when the sun and heat make it very difficult to work the land.Samuel Sánchez
They return with bananas, mangoes, cassava and other cereals that they dry and store and which, ground, are the basis of their diet.Samuel Sánchez
When they talk about “marriage,” these girls almost always refer to informal unions that do not go through the Civil Registry.
They simply go to live with the man who asked them to marry.
Births are often not registered either, so in these communities people are not very clear about their age or the age of their children.
That the registry begins to operate effectively is another priority objective for the authorities, because proving anything without supporting papers is very complicated.
Be girls again
Mendina and Belita go to group therapy once a week with other girls who have married as minors or who have been victims of sexual violence.
The stories you hear are terrifying.
The youngest of all, barely 13 years old who looks like 8, tells with her gaze fixed, and without saying it explicitly, how her uncle raped her one night.
And Mendina cries inconsolably when she tells the story of her abusive husband.
After each intervention they approach each other, smile and hug each other tightly.
“Friends are very important,” says Belita.
“When I talk to them I feel better.”
The group therapy is led by a psychologist, Celeste Fabiao Chinsipo, a sweet and loving woman who is in constant contact with the girls and who insists on the importance of them becoming children again.
“The reality is that some of them have never been married, not even before they got married,” she explains.
“They haven't even had access to colored pencils.
Here they color, they jump, and they look happy doing all these things despite already being 15 or 16 years old.
They have experienced very strong things.
Some have attempted suicide.
There are many traumas that have happened.
Now they are breastfeeding and caring for their children all day long without being psychologically prepared for it.
And in many moments, they also believe that what has happened to them is their fault.
I forbid them to say anything bad about themselves.
They have to learn to get rid of that feeling and build their dreams again.
But it is not easy".
PHOTO GALLERY: Capoeira and colored pencils
Graffiti next to a sports hall shows what doesn't have to happen: a teenager getting married.
And what is: men who take care of babies.Samuel Sánchez
Celeste Fabiao Chinsipo, psychologist, leads group therapy for victims of child marriages or sexual violence.Samuel Sánchez
Here they are girls again.
“Some have never been,” says Celeste.
“It's incredible to see how enthusiastic they are about colored pencils.”Samuel Sánchez
The youngest is 13 years old and has a horror story behind her that she tells slowly and with her gaze fixed.Samuel Sánchez
The girls talk about their life experiences.
Almost all of them end up collapsing when recounting their hard experiences.Samuel Sánchez
They all hug each other after sharing their stories.Samuel Sánchez
A space to build trust is the capoeira class.
Here they jump, sing and do somersaults as a couple.Samuel Sánchez
“In capoeira you have to trust the other, your partner,” explains Joana Vasconcelos, the teacher.
“It is very interesting as an activity to regain self-esteem and trust in others.”Samuel Sánchez
In the villages, local NGOs, together with Unicef, hold community dialogues to promote awareness about the havoc caused by child marriage.Samuel Sánchez
School is an obsession for all of them.
It's the only thing they want.
They repeat it over and over again in every conversation, in every interview.
They only want to be provided with the notebooks, pencils, uniform and shoes that they must wear to school to be able to study.
The majority are going to join the new school year, which begins in February.
Some schools are perfectly built and maintained.
Others don't.
Joanita's, for example, has many walls destroyed by the cyclones, so that not even the separation between classrooms is such.
But she doesn't care.
She knows that only by studying can she do better in life.
Getting married again and living with a man again has become her worst nightmare.
They all agree on the same professions when asked about the future, about their dreams: doctor, nurse, teacher.
They explain that they want to help and care for others.
“And working is the only way out of this poverty,” says Asica Cadir Ali, 17 years old.
Furthermore, they are the three professions in which they do see women practicing.
It doesn't seem like a totally impossible dream to them.
They are very aware of machismo, although they do not call it that.
They know that the living conditions of boys and girls, men and women, are very different.
And they know well that the region's poverty does not have the same impact on the future of men: no one expects them to get married, but only to go to school to be able to find a job and prosper.
“There are many things men don't do,” says one of them.
“Girls and women go to get water and they waste it.
We cook, wash, take care of the children, and we also go to the
mashamba
with the men to cultivate the land.
They have many privileges since they are children.”
The literacy rate speaks for itself about inequality.
The gender gap is brutal.
In Mozambique, 28% of men do not know how to read or write, but in the case of women the figure rises to 51% according to data from the Mozambican National Institute of Statistics from 2019 and 2020.
02:12
Premature marriage in Mozambique.
Interview with Celeste, ICDP psychologist
In addition to group therapy, and individual therapies in the communities for girls who live further away, like Joanita, the big moment of the week is the capoeira classes in a pavilion in Monapo.
About twenty boys and girls are doing somersaults, jumping, moving beautifully in pairs.
They clap their hands.
They play the pandeiro and the berimbau.
“It's a game of trust with each other,” explains Joana Vasconcelos, the teacher and founder of the NGO
Capoeira para umfuture
, which works with UNICEF, which the girls adore.
“It's about trusting that the other is there.
To lose fear.
"To heal the wounds."
It is, of course, the moment when you see them smile the most.
Outside, graffiti shows a girl crying at her wedding and men washing dishes or caring for a baby.
Suzete Nhangomele is Monapo's district administrator, a mayor of sorts.
She is an energetic woman who says that eradicating child marriage is a top priority for her.
“I am very concerned about this, and about sexual violence.
There are many girls raped.
Some, by their father or a relative.
Others depend on older men who have married them.
They must be taught to become aware of themselves.
And there are cultural practices that are very harmful, such as initiation rites.”
Some mysterious and half-secret rites
These words, rites of passage, are heard over and over again when discussing child marriage.
Many times they are said in a very low voice.
Almost in whispers despite being something that practically all girls go through.
But no one, not the girls, not the midwives, not the parents, want to explain well what they are.
In principle, it is simple: when girls begin to menstruate, parents take them to midwives who explain how to wash, what the period consists of, and give them basic hygiene advice.
This would be the first phase of the ritual.
Afterwards, there is a second one in which they are told about “respect for the community and family” and they are instructed on how they should behave now that they are “women.”
And in the third, the most controversial, they teach them how to be good wives.
Supposedly, the three phases should be done separately, at different times during adolescence.
But many times they are done all at once, on a weekend, after the girl has had her first period.
That is, at 11, 12 or 13 years old.
After many questions, and after two hours of conversation and a million doubts, a group of four girls agree to give more details about what their initiation rites were like, all four of them quite similar.
—They took us to a house in a forest all weekend.
Strange things happened there.
Rites simulating that we had killed our mothers and resurrected them.
Then the midwives began to talk to us about more practical matters.
How we had to wash ourselves when we got our period or how we had to take care of the family and behave with everyone from now on.
We were 12 or 13 years old and had just started menstruating.
From left to right, Gelsea (16 years old), Esmeralda (17), Ersane (16) and Enjulta (16), with their babies Osvalda, Leonardo, Venicio and Danildo.
They live in Rapale, in the Mozambican province of Nampula.
They all married as minors, became mothers and returned to their families.Samuel Sánchez
Ersane, Esmeralda, Erjulta and Gelsea are teenagers and live in Rapale, also in the province of Nampula.
The four of them got married shortly after doing the initiation rite, when they were minors.
All four had children.
The four separated.
And the four are now fighting to return to school.
—There they also told us about our future husbands.
They told us that we must respect them, that we cannot interrupt them, that we have to speak to them sweetly, that we have to prepare water for them to bathe and make food for them, that we have to wash ourselves well before going to bed and sleep without clothes. in case they feel like sex.
And that, after sex, we must clean the man with a cloth, go get water to wash his hands, massage his legs and hug him until he falls asleep.
They also told us that when we are menstruating we should show them a red bean so that they know.
And we should not add salt to our food on those days so that our stomachs do not hurt.
The girls start to laugh uncomfortably and say that they also taught them other things.
Things they didn't like.
And they insinuate that the midwives gave them more or less precise details of how a man should be satisfied sexually.
However, throughout that weekend there was not a word about contraceptive methods, about how to avoid unwanted pregnancies.
Sexual information is scarce in a country where 36% of women aged 15 to 19 have been pregnant and three out of 10 have at least one child.
“Sex education is a big challenge for everyone,” explains Sabine Michiels, adolescent development specialist at the UNICEF office in Maputo, the capital.
“There is an online platform so that children and young people between 10 and 24 years old can ask their questions and work is being done to reach them through social networks.
Mobile brigades go to communities with little Internet access to give talks.
But there is still much to be done, and initiation rites continue to perpetuate inequalities, promoting the idea that women have to be submissive and preparing them for a very early sexual debut.
That is why it is important to work with midwives so that these ceremonies include information about sexual health and the duty to respect the law that prohibits marriage before the age of 18.”
The work to eradicate child marriage involves reaching out to all areas: midwives, teachers, health workers, community leaders, religious leaders... “It is essential to have their help to change such deep-rooted practices,” says Suzete Nhangomele, the administrator of Monapo.
“What the religious leader says in the church or the mosque, for example, is almost like a law.”
One way to do this is community dialogues.
In Topolane, Amidu Amissie, the village leader, addresses about thirty residents gathered in an assembly: “We have to let our daughters grow and study,” he says.
“Also, marrying them to get money doesn't work.
Then they come home, with their babies, and there are more mouths to feed, more poverty.
Girls who get pregnant have anemia, obstetric problems, sometimes they die in childbirth, their husbands abandon them... We cannot allow them to be treated like this.
We must look after their future.”
Mendina is 17 years old, she returned to her sister's house with her one-year-old daughter Yumina after the man she married disappeared.
She lives in an adobe house in Netia (Monapo). Samuel Sánchez
“We are passionate”
The marriages of the four Rapale girls are somewhat different from those of Joanita, Mendina or Belita.
They did not agree to marry a stranger nor did their family force them to go with a man much older than them.
The four of them fell in love with boys around the age of 18 and decided to live with them.
“We are passionate about it,” says Gelsea in Portuguese, the official language in Mozambique due to its colonial past that not everyone speaks or writes even though it is the language used in schools.
“We lived together for a year.
I was well.
I washed the dishes, I cooked, I swept, I did the laundry, I went to farm the
mashamba
.
But I wanted to go back to school.
And my husband left without saying anything before my baby was born.”
Enjulta también se casó porque le gustó un chico. Pero, como ocurre de forma cada vez más habitual, el líder de la comunidad les obligó a separarse informando a toda la familia de que esa unión era ilegal y de que estaba castigada en el Código Penal. Lo mismo le pasó a Ersane. Se enamoró, se fue a vivir con el chaval, se quedó embarazada, el líder del pueblo les dijo que estaba prohibido y regresó a la casa de su tía Rosalina con su hijo Venicio, un precioso y enorme bebé que tiene ahora cuatro meses. Basta acompañarla una mañana a 38 grados a recoger plátanos, mangos, alubias y mijo a la mashamba familiar, a una hora de distancia y con Venicio a la espalda y un cubo gigante sobre la cabeza, para entender la dureza de su vida, que acepta resignada pero con la ilusión de lograr, algún día, ser enfermera.
La evolución de los datos sobre matrimonios infantiles en el mundo es esperanzadora, aunque lenta. Poco a poco van disminuyendo mientras crece la concienciación de que es una discriminación de género que hay que hacer desaparecer. En algunas zonas el éxito es apabullante. En el sur de Asia, por ejemplo, la tasa de uniones prematuras ha descendido en los últimos años del 50% al 30% gracias a la inversión en educación y a un abordaje múltiple por parte de los Gobiernos. “Hay algunos programas exitosos en estos países que dan dinero directamente a las familias pobres con niñas para asegurarse de que van a estudiar hasta la secundaria, por ejemplo”, explica Nankali Maksud. “En otros lugares del mundo se va avanzando también, pero más despacio. Y se trata de una violación grave de derechos humanos básicos”.
Algunas de estas chicas tienen a veces las caras más tristes del mundo. Como Joanita, que no habla con nadie de lo que le pasó. “No quiero problemas. Por eso no hablo. Nunca hablo. Me parece que todo el mundo se ríe de mí”. Es una sensación compartida. Aunque casarse siendo menor de edad es aún una práctica habitual en Mozambique, todas creen que está mal visto. Y más cuando han tenido que volver a casa con un bebé y sin padre. Son adolescentes con la autoestima rota.
01:49
Matrimonio prematuro en Mozambique. Entrevista a Joana, maestra de capoeira
Por eso, las psicólogas, las técnicas de las ONG y la profesora de capoeira tienen una única obsesión: que recuperen sus sueños, que no dejen de creer que sus vidas pueden cambiar. La traductora que nos acompaña, Amelina Nhachunge, una mujer resuelta y llena de fuerza, tras una de las sesiones del grupo de autoayuda en la que han llorado, se han dicho cosas bonitas a sí mismas y se han abrazado, les contó su historia:
—Yo no vengo de un barrio rico de Maputo. Mi familia es muy pobre también, como las vuestras, y esforzándome mucho he conseguido ser traductora, ganar un sueldo digno, viajar. Así que vosotras lo podéis lograr igual que yo. Estudiar, trabajar y tener una buena vida es posible. Adelante.
Suddenly everyone focuses their attention on her.
They smile.
They ask him questions.
And they think that maybe, despite everything, there can be hope.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I am already a subscriber
_