We recently covered high school kids who are eating chips from home rather than submit to the indignity of a balanced meal with vegetables and exposure to different ethnic foods. A running gag was on Twitter from the first round of Christmas morning whiners, teens who were devastated that they didn't get an iPad or iPhone. Now I'm going to tell you about another teen, whose story is amazing... and yet not at all unusual for a girl her age in Afghanistan.
Sahar Gul is fifteen years old. According to sources, she is "not doing well" in the hospital. She has been tortured. Cut. Burned. Locked in a basement and starved. Her nails were pulled out. She is so damaged she cannot say a word. Her face is unrecognizable because of the extensive bruising. They cut off her hair. Did I mention the pulled her fingernails out? She has been hurting for so long that she recoils from human touch, even in her sleep. She pulls her hand away in fear of the agony that is to come. She is reduced to diapers because she couldn't make it to the bathroom on her own.
What did she do to deserve this treatment? She was married off at fifteen, to a 30-year-old man. He left her with his family, and this was what she got for refusing to engage in prostitution. That was all. She was beaten, scarred and emotionally destroyed because she refused to sell her body. The Women's Network has stepped in and helped her get a lawyer and donations are being collected to go towards her care. She'll live, but right now for her that's about as good as it is going to get.
Things are different here. Mostly. All the same, I think I'm going to say a little prayer of thanks the little girls in my world live where they can't be married off and thought of as nothing more than property. I'll also say one for all the girls like Sahar Gul, who suffer and nobody knows their name.
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