A girl has a right to a good education, just like a boy, but there are some circumstances that hinder her from achieving the target. Sometimes parents are blamed as putting hurdles in her way; sometimes male chauvinism is blamed; sometimes norms and sometimes the girl herself. Factors contributing to this tendency are many and some of them are very hard to control.
As a toddler, she is always beside her mother in the kitchen, watching and sometimes holding the ladle as her mother refrains from agitating the contents in the pot. As she attains the age of four, she mixes water and sand in small plastic containers and begins to make agitations, imitating her mother as she sees her in the kitchen.
During this time she also carries toys on her back, pretending to be carrying her baby.
The parents are blamed for assigning the daughter in the kitchen to cook and care for her younger siblings, but there seems to be no other alternative, because the family is supposed to eat, the house is supposed to be cleaned, utensils have to be washed, on some days there’s laundry to be done and the boys might be taking care of livestock and performing other duties for the family, like building and repairing barns and even working in the family farm, with their parents.
To say that the girl had been performing the duties of a servant is wrong, since many of our families in rural areas do not have servants although there are duties to be performed.
The girl as well as the boys will be performing those duties during the primary school days, without disturbing their classroom attendance, simply by programming themselves according to the time they have, performing family duties when they are out of school and attending school, when they are so required.
However, when they return home in the evening and its time to cook, the girl joins her mother in the kitchen, while the boys sit to do their school assignments. When the food is ready, the family sits at the table and when all are through with supper it is already time to go to bed.
Of course the girl’s assignments would not be done. When she wakes up the following morning, she leaps out of bed and rushes to school, only to be rebuked by the teachers whose assignments have not been done. Ashamed, the girl begins to bite her fingernails, while tears flow down her cheeks. As she recalls that she was cooking food, which her brother, ate after finishing his homework and now she is in trouble for not doing her own homework.
She blames herself for being born a girl. If she is hot tempered and a situation of this kind occurs often, this girl is likely to drop out of school very early in life.
So far, only the girl’s home-life has been touched. At school, other situations just as discouraging occur. If we turn to a research conducted by Girls and Women’s Education Policy Research Activity (GWRPRA) in Peru, it was found out that girls do not have adequate support in school during menstruation, because they lacked bathroom facilities, water and sanitary supplies; so sitting for long periods of time, staining their clothes with blood, sometimes being noticed and teased by boys makes adolescent girls anxious and uneasy, hence discouraged to go on smoothly with studies.
Since the facilities lacking in Peru schools are like those lacking in our schools, schoolgirls in Tanzania face the same difficulties which Peru schoolgirls face.
As a girl fights the challenges outside herself, other challenges creep in from within. She wants her studies, but she cannot resist impulses countermanding her development.
She divides her time between studies and courting. Parents and counselors always try to warn girls not to mix studies with love, but even some of those parents or counselors have managed to complete primary education just by a force from outside themselves, which some call grace of God.
Some have not even completed standard seven, while others had only two years of schooling, because they began ‘chasing’ men.
Notwithstanding this, a man who marries at 40 is considered normal, while a woman who marries at 30 is considered old.
The man could engage a girl twenty years his junior, without arousing any kind of curiosity in society, yet a woman married to a man younger than herself raises eyebrows. This is considered ambiguous, causing the husband to be teased by friends and even being hated by his relatives.
Due to conditions like these, a girl may choose to cut short her studies to find herself a man of her choice before it is too late to find one.
She may decide to get married and pursue higher learning later, but after marriage she finds herself with too many commitments, that she loses hope; one may think of going back to studies but find herself being pulled back by her baby, and as she weans that one she finds herself pregnant again and sometimes she may just decide to remain by her husband’s side for fear of losing him. Some men cannot stand being loose for a while; given a month they could father ten children.
These facts are common, affecting almost every girl although some to a lesser degree, but what society is supposed to do is to help the girl more. I, the writer of this story went to one senior officer in the police force to seek help so that I could get my daughter back home.
The girl who was then in a day secondary school had gone missing for five days. To my astonishment, the police officer shouted, “Shall I waste my solders’ time and energy to go for a woman who has run away with a lover?” He did not even want to know her age, even circumstances surrounding the event.
Mine is only one of such cases, but I have witnessed several of this kind as they were being handled by the police. Also in one case, a father married off her daughter simply because she had ‘stumbled’ and slept at a boy’s home, while she was a student.
He locked her outside his house, forcing her to go back to the boy. The girl had to go back to the boy because she had no alternative. That was the end of her school life. She remained with the boy till she became a mother and returned home to her father, because the boy could not take care of her and her child.
Her father said that he could not shut his eyes to avoid seeing his daughter’s suffering, so he had asked her to come back home. Why couldn’t that compassionate heart step in on that single night she slept at the boy’s? It’s not my intention to advise girls to sleep at boys houses but once it happens that a daughter has escaped from her parents’ custody with an intention “to be with him just for a while and come back” being too harsh could worsen matters.
It is wiser to think about the nature of a human being regarding impulses and companionships, and then think what you as a parent had done during your teenage days.
Some mothers have had several abortions before marriage, but they become strict with their daughters. How can you be so strict with someone else, when you couldn’t be so with yourself? Don’t leave her loose, but if she strays go for her and bring her back, before it is too late. Take a lesson from the father who had to call her daughter back home after becoming a mother while she already had dropped out of school.
SOURCE:
THE GUARDIAN
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