by Paul Salopek

Tihun Nebiyu the goat herder doesn't want to marry. She is adamant about this. But in her village nobody heeds the opinions of headstrong little girls.

That's why she's kneeling in the filigreed shade of her favorite thorn tree, dropping beetles down her dress. Magic beetles.

"When they bite you here--" Tihun explains gravely, pressing the scrabbling insects into her chest through the fabric of her tattered smock "--it makes your breasts grow."

This is Tihun's own wishful brand of sorcery--a child's desperate measure to turn herself into an adult. Then maybe, just maybe, her family would respect her wishes not to wed. She could rebuff the strange man her papa has chosen to be her husband. And she wouldn't have to bear his dumb babies.

Tihun kneels in the dirt, eyes closed: an elfin figure whose smile is made goofily endearing by two missing front teeth. She holds her small hands over her nipples. She is waiting for the bugs' enchantment to start. Seconds pass. But nothing happens. Eventually, she starts to giggle. The beetles have escaped--by crawling up her neck.

"It doesn't work!" Tihun says, disgusted. She heaves an exaggerated sigh and squints out across the yellow-grass hills surrounding her world: "I will just have to run."

But this is childish bluster. Tihun's short legs can't carry her away fast enough from the death of her childhood. Her wedding is five days away. And she is 7 years old.

Girls no more

There are, according to child-rights activists, an estimated 50 million Tihuns scattered across the world: young teen or even preteen girls whose innocence is being sacrificed to arranged marriages, often with older men.

Coerced by family and culture into lives of servility and isolation, and scarred by the trauma of too-early pregnancy, child brides represent a vast, lost generation of children.

While humanitarian campaigns have focused global attention on childhood AIDS in Africa, female genital mutilation and child labor, one of the underlying sources of all these woes remains largely ignored. Child marriage, an ancient, entrenched practice long hidden in shadow, was only denounced by the United Nations as a serious human-rights violation in 2001.

"This is a big, tough, complicated issue," concedes Abebe Kebede, a leading Ethiopian social worker.

"It hasn't been highlighted that much because marriage is viewed positively in almost every culture," Kebede says. "Who wants to tackle that? Never mind that the consequences for kids--and whole nations--are pretty disastrous."

The most brutal toll is medical: Early pregnancies are the leading cause of death for girls age 15 to 19 in the developing world, says the UN. And medical relief groups believe that at least 2 million women worldwide are currently living with gruesome vaginal and anal ruptures, called fistulas, that result from bearing children much too young. Untreated fistulas can be fatal, and survivors are usually left incontinent for life.

But child marriage ruins lives in other ways too. Often treated like indentured servants, young brides are subject to beatings by their grown husbands and in-laws. And thousands of girls end up trapped in the sex trade, whether through organized child bride trafficking rings in countries such as China or, in Africa, by simply drifting from abusive marriages into street prostitution, social workers say.

The most far-reaching injustice of child marriage by far, however, is probably its most subtle: It pries millions of young girls out of school. Confined to their husbands' homes, and cheated of the benefits of education, legions of demoralized children worldwide are condemned to lives of ignorance and dire poverty from which they rarely escape, and which they endure with numbed desperation.

"That's the most heartbreaking thing about this issue," says Micol Zarb, a spokeswoman for the UN Population Fund, or UNFPA, which monitors global reproductive health. "All the misery and pain is occurring in silence. These are just kids. They don't speak out. We never hear from them."

According to the UNFPA, at least 49 countries in the world, roughly a quarter of all nations, face a significant child bride problem--that is, at least 15 percent of their girls marry younger than age 18, the widely recognized threshold of adulthood.

Not surprisingly, the epicenters of child wedlock are sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where cementing clan ties through marriage, a preoccupation with bridal virginity and fear of contracting AIDS are strongest.

Ethiopia is one such hot spot. Its government, pressured by aid organizations, has started prohibiting early marriages. Yet the tradition is hard to stamp out.

Among Ethiopia's rural Amhara people--a culture of warrior-farmers in which a staggering 82 percent of all brides are underage--the drumming and tribal dancing that enliven child weddings can still be heard echoing through the mountain nights. Only it is a bit muffled these days: The grooms and their tiny, bewildered brides--cocooned in white cloth--simply have moved their nuptials indoors.

This is the story of just one child bride, Tihun, the whimsical goatherd.

Born into the Amhara ethnic group, she sings nonsense songs in breathy Amharic in a remote valley filled with plowed fields and blackbirds, high in the rugged Horn of Africa. And in the last childhood summer of her life, she still believed in the liberating power of magic.

In Amharaland

Tihun's world is gorgeous and cruel.

It is the golden month of May. With its straw-colored hills, toga-draped shepherds and loaf-like volcanic buttes jutting to 7,000 feet, the remote homeland of some 16 million Amharas looks like a landscape straight out of J.R.R. Tolkien's fable "The Hobbit"--the ethereal Africa of dreams.

But conversations with the shy children in the region reveal a disconcerting fact: Virtually every little girl in sight--whether carrying a bundle of firewood or racing across lumpy fields--is already spoken for. The 11-year-old buying sweets at a village market is somebody's wife. Two girls playing an elaborate Ethiopian version of hopscotch in the dust are soon to be brides. And a scrawny 5th grader skipping home from school is already divorced. Divorce, though frowned upon, can occur when families feud.

Amharaland has the highest child marriage rates in the world, according to UN and Ethiopian statistics; in some dusty corners of the ancient highlands, almost 90 percent of the local girls are married before age 15.

The forces behind this startling demographic are at work in all child bride cultures--just taken to extremes in the heart of Ethiopia.

Local poverty is wrenching. Barefoot children sprint after passing cars to beg for garbage--especially the disposable water bottles tossed out by foreign aid workers, which are coveted over the villagers' heavy clay jugs.

The highland rains are erratic. Famine haunts the cooking fires. And because daughters rarely inherit fertile lands, keeping them at home and feeding them are considered a folly. Better to marry them off quickly, the logic of survival goes, to strengthen family alliances for the lean times.

The Amharas' demands for bridal virginity, meanwhile, can be fanatical. Anxious parents push their daughters into wedlock years before puberty because they fear the onset of menstruation may be mistaken for the taboo of premarital sex.

And the powerful Ethiopian Orthodox Church has long played a role in early matchmaking. Church teachings traditionally encouraged marriage before age 15, declaring that this was the age of the Virgin Mary at the Immaculate Conception of Christ.

"During these times we have started to advocate against that idea," says Simia Kone Melak, a bearded priest at one of the hundreds of rock-walled monasteries dotting Amhara country. "The government has told us that child marriage is wrong. So we are telling families to wait."

Yet priests continue to bless early marriages. And the new message butts up against centuries of younger-is-better belief.

"In truth, if a girl reaches 13, she is already too old to be married," declares Nebiyu Melese, 54, Tihun's wiry farmer father. "I know some people say this is uncivilized. But they don't live here. So how can they judge?"

Tough, opinionated Melese, his sad-eyed wife, Beyenech Alem, 45, and their seven children are traditional Amharas in many ways. They plant millet and corn, and sleep next to their goats in a mud-walled house infested with ticks and fleas.

But just as families vary in American suburbia, so they do in African villages. Tihun was born into a gruff, noisy household--the clan's squabbles reverberate across fields 50 yards away. A pious and conservative patriarch, Melese disdains schooling for his girls and brooks no resistance to early marriage.

To save on wedding expenses, he has shrewdly arranged to marry off four of his children on the same day. Tihun and her more worldly big sister Dinke, 10, will be carted away on horses by strangers who are their husbands. And two teenage sons will bring home 10-year-old brides.

For Tihun, Melese has scored a minor coup: a deacon in the Orthodox Church.

"He has a good lemon orchard," Melese says approvingly.

It never occurs to the stern old man to consult his youngest daughter on these decisions. Unless issuing orders, he never speaks to her at all.

This isn't coldheartedness. It is a form of emotional self-preservation on the harsher edges of the world--a place where one out of five children die before reaching the age of 5.

Tricked by life

Tihun is sulking.

It is three days before her wedding. She sits with her legs akimbo under the thorn tree, passing time with her 6-year-old pal Mulusaw. Two bony girls in rag dresses. They play an Amhara version of jacks--tossing and catching small pebbles.

"I would rather be eaten by a hyena than marry that person," Tihun complains of her unknown fiance. "Nobody ever listens to me!"

Today she has given up on magic as her means of salvation. As the wedding ceremony approaches, she grows withdrawn. She whispers sullenly that she might be better off dead.

Mulusaw nods in sympathy. She will be betrothed next year. But to a 6-year-old, that is an eternity away.

Soon Tihun and Mulusaw are laughing--wrestling in the packed dust. Tihun forgets about her future. She forgets to keep an eye on her goats. The bucktoothed animals invade the family's potato patch. And furious shouts erupt from the farmhouse.

"Tihun is careless," says Mintiwab, 22, Tihun's eldest sister, who was abandoned by her husband and lives at home. "She is always in trouble."

And it's true. Tihun is an incompetent farm laborer. Easily bored, prone to daydreaming, she is distracted by odd-shaped rocks in the fields, slow-moving insects and the flocks of pied crows racing like pepper grains across the sunlit sky.

Her marauding animals ravage many potato seedlings. Later, Mintiwab beats Tihun with a switch. Arms and bare feet pumping, the little girl runs off screeching into the fields, her face contorted more by surprise than pain--as if somehow tricked by life again.

An exotic refuge

One of Tihun's secret diversions is watching village children walk home from school. She nudges her unruly goats to a hilltop overlooking the Chinese-built road where they come trudging--platoons of boys and girls in patched clothes. Tihun gapes at them in awe. Her head cocked sideways on her scrawny neck. Blinking in silence.

Does she want to attend school? Of course. Why? She cannot say. School is something mysterious. Exotic. Students are elite beings. They have special possessions--a tattered government workbook. (They share old pencil stubs.) But her papa has allowed only one older brother to enroll. And Tihun must fill his job as a herder.

In Ethiopia, education is mandatory for both sexes until the 6th grade. But in Tihun's remote valley, many families keep their girls at home through their school-age years to tap their farm labor. Parents also fear for their daughters' virginity at the mud-and-wattle schoolhouse 3 miles away.

Child-rights workers worldwide agree that education is the single most important key unlocking the prison of child marriage.

Essential for enhancing a girl's income potential--and for broadening her horizons--schoolwork also gives her body time to mature before the rigors of childbirth.

"It's the key reason the practice is declining in the places where it's declining," says Kathleen Kurz, an analyst with the non-governmental International Center for Research on Women in Washington. "Convincing parents of the benefits of schooling works far better than just banning child marriage outright."

In countries such as India, secondary education has slashed child marriage rates by up to two-thirds. And across the developing world, girls who complete primary school tend to marry four years later and have on average two fewer children, UN surveys show.

In the smoky villages of rural Ethiopia--some of the least educated communities in the world--the girls who step into crude schoolrooms are revolutionaries in braids.

"I only remember my marriage like a dream," says Zigiju Mola, 12, an Amhara 5th grader who was married at 6 but who stubbornly persuaded her parents to continue paying her school fees.

"I also give my husband courage to attend school," says Zigiju, a precocious girl with tattooed beauty marks on her cheeks. "He wants to keep an eye on me and not be left behind."

Her husband, an embarrassed-looking youth of 18, scrunches behind his 2nd-grade plank desk in the same dirt-floored school.

Scores of girls at the school are child brides.

"That's exactly why conservative parents distrust education," says Banchalem Addis, one of the handful of women teachers in Amharaland. "Most pupils never want to go back to the farm and be their mother-in-laws' slaves."

The runaways

Some 150 miles from Tihun's valley, in a working-class neighborhood of Addis Ababa, the teeming Ethiopian capital, a strange, creaking metal structure towers over the houses: a multistory homeless shelter made from stacked shipping containers.

Erected by a local humanitarian project called Godanaw, the shelter has provided skills training and health care to some 1,200 street girls--three-quarters of them escapees from early marriages in the countryside.

"I don't ever want to be touched by a man again," says glassy-eyed Alem Siraj, 19, who straggled into the rickety structure with her 5-month-old baby, Nebiyu.

Siraj walked out of her arranged marriage in the highlands when she was 14, rode a bus to Addis Ababa, found work as a maid and was raped, she says, by her employer--the father of her son. She was fired when her pregnancy showed, Siraj says.

Like tens of thousands of other outcasts from early marriage, she can never go home. But life could get worse. Countless runaways like her end up mired in the sex trade.

The northern town of Bahar Dar is one such trap for the vulnerable flotsam of Ethiopia's child marriages.

Bars hawking millet beer, or tela, line the dingy streets. After dark, small girls can be seen wiping tables, carrying glasses or lounging by doorways that gush blue light and Ethiopian pop music at cruising cars. At one establishment, a shy, teen bar girl named Belayinesh describes in a monotone her flight from an arranged marriage and her battered hope "that someone here will help me."

"AIDS awaits her," says Teshone Belete, a social worker visiting the bar on his rounds through the back alleys of the city. "She will be dead in five years."

The plagues of HIV and child marriage go hand in hand throughout the developing world.

Even those young brides not forced into prostitution usually end up with higher-than-average infection rates. Research by the non-profit Population Council shows that because their husbands are older, often sexually experienced and possibly carrying the virus already, child wives are more at risk of AIDS than single girls their age.

Tragically, the infection rates of child brides in Africa are pumped even higher by the spreading folk belief that sex with virgin girls can cure AIDS. In Ethiopia, according to the UN, 6 out of 10 new HIV cases are found in girls under 24.

Sewareg Debas, 18, is aware of this risk.

A striking Amhara bar girl with long braided hair, she was forced to drop out of the 8th grade for an arranged marriage. As she tells her familiar story inside a parked car, a mob of red-eyed drunks spills out of her employer's saloon. Slurring their words, they jeer her for speaking to strangers. They pound belligerently on the rolled-up car windows. A large crowd of curious onlookers assembles. Debas falls silent. Terrified, she stares mutely into her lap.

This happens in the village of Meshenti, on the Chinese road to Tihun's farm.

Trinkets and plastic shoes

Tihun is dazzled.

Mintiwab has brought home a fabulous treasure: Tihun's wedding gown. A simple cotton dress patterned with flowers. Tihun can't tear her eyes from it, cannot stop touching it. And there is more. A pair of plastic slippers. A grown-up's woven shawl. Some cheap bangles. Beads and trinkets.

Tihun yanks on this magnificent finery and skitters around the family hut. For the first time in her life, the center of attention. A woman in miniature. She marries tomorrow.

Yezare amete, yemamushe enate: "By this time next year, the mother of a son."

For all Amharas, this wedding song is unambiguous. A girl's highest function is to produce boys--quickly and often. Starting, on average, at age 14, an Amhara girl will give birth every year for 15 years. She will be left with seven surviving children, Ethiopia's national average.

Tihun will not be forced to have sex for a couple of years. (This is tacitly agreed upon by the two families.) But when the time comes--usually no later than age 12--her jubilant husband will carry a bloodstained sheet like a pennant to her parents.

For millions of other child brides, initiations into sex can be even more traumatic.

Among the minority Gurage people of Ethiopia, pubescent brides are typically "softened up" with natural purgatives and fasting, and their fingernails are clipped. On the night of the wedding, the groom forces himself on his weakened wife. She is expected to resist. Cheers erupt outside the nuptial hut when news of the consummation reaches the wedding guests.

On extremely rare occasions, the children meet violence with violence.

Among the Oromo people in Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan, for example, there is the notorious practice of "marriage by abduction." In this case, there is no consent whatever: A groom secures a bride by kidnapping and raping a girl he fancies. Her robbed virginity becomes the basis of marriage.

This tribal custom made headlines in Ethiopia when a 14-year-old schoolgirl shot dead her rapist and would-be husband with an AK-47 assault rifle. She was acquitted of murder, to the astonishment of the conservative public. A women's rights group in the country called the verdict "a revolution against male culture."

Tihun has no inkling of what awaits her.

"I won't tell her," whispers Alem, her stooped old mother, who married at 10. "It is our custom that she experience it on her own."

Tihun minces about in her plastic slippers all afternoon. The new shoes blister her untamed feet. But she is too giddy to care. And she no longer plans to escape her wedding.

The ultimate pariahs

There is a hospital in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, where you must breathe through your mouth.

The reek of feces and urine mixed with disinfectant is dizzying. Footprint-shaped stains of human waste lead from the sunny, white-tiled wards to a secluded garden outside. These are the tracks of the patients--women and girls whose reproductive tissues have been horribly ripped apart by too-early childbirth. Meekly clutching towels about their waists, leaking constantly, they stagger under the trees, sucking in fresh air.

The Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital may look like the darkest dead end of the child bride experience.

But in truth, only the lucky come here. For every one of the 1,200 girls who are operated on yearly for fistulas--the term for the ruptures caused by too-big babies' heads blocking too-small pelvises--there are at least 10 others left untreated in the bush.

According to the UN Population Fund, some 2 million women worldwide suffer the devastating ailment. About 50,000 to 100,000 new cases emerge annually, perhaps 10,000 of them in Ethiopia alone. Thousands of fistula victims die untended in their remote villages. Nobody really knows the number.

"These girls are the ultimate pariahs," says Ruth Kennedy, an American midwife who helps manage the charity hospital. "Imagine stinking and staining up things, and drawing flies. Husbands and families disown them. They end up as beggars or hermits."

Like many people who grapple with human suffering every day, Kennedy hides her empathy behind a facade of brusque, no-nonsense efficiency.

She strides down the hospital's incessantly mopped halls, rattling off practical solutions to the scourge of early pregnancy. Like keeping the pressure on the Orthodox Church to preach more strenuously against child marriage. Or opening all-girls schools to convince skeptical parents that their daughters' virginity will be shielded from male students. Or simply building more roads in the rugged interior to speed pregnant girls to medical care more quickly.

She has little time for well-meaning campaigns by outside humanitarian groups.

"You know, foreign donors come here and lecture the Ethiopians, `You must protect these poor, oppressed children and stamp out early marriage,'" Kennedy says. "But what about our own 13-year-old daughters in America and Europe who are having sex with multiple partners? We're handing out condoms in schools. So it's pretty hypocritical, isn't it?"

Mostly, though, she just tells stories.

Such as: "There was this beautiful 16-year-old Afar girl. She suffered terrible, terrible injuries. She had been in labor for four days. The baby died. She squeezed it out as a piece of dead meat."

Or: "One girl gave birth to six dead babies in a row. The sixth finally gave her a fistula."

Or: "One mother was carried here for 2 1/2 days by her 18-year-old son. He had urine and feces streaming down his back. That is love."

Feast and celebration

Tihun hasn't spoken all day.

Her husband arrived at midnight, as prescribed by Amhara custom, with an escort of nine best friends. He is Ayalew, an Orthodox Church deacon of 17, handsome, regal, wrapped in a dazzling white robe and sheltered from the sky by a large red umbrella. He barely speaks.

"Oh! Miss Tihun," his best man proclaims in a formal wedding address, "you are very lucky! Having a priest to marry, God picked you like Virgin Mary!"

Scores of neighbors arrive to join in a feast of sour injera bread and goat meat. Millet beer flows by the barrelful. Dozens of dancers steam up the cramped air inside the family hut. Cow-horn trumpets and skin drums reverberate far into the next starlit night.

Melese doesn't care if the government fines him 100 birr, or $12, for breaking Ethiopia's new civil codes, which stipulate a minimum legal marrying age of 18 for girls. Bustling about among the milling guests like an anxious maitre d', he urges them to sing louder. He wants to announce the weddings of his two boys and girls to the world.

Tihun has been bathed with a wet rag. Her head has been shaved and she wears her prized dress. Huddled with her sister Dinke in a corner of the cavelike hut, she watches the amazements of her marriage ceremony pinwheel about her. Preternaturally still. Narcotized by sleeplessness--by fasting that, according to tradition, will calm her. Mulusaw, her inseparable friend, lies next to her to provide comfort.

With the formal marriage request to old Melese over, there is no further elaborate ritual. The celebration flows. Tihun and her new husband never exchange a word.

By dawn the next morning she is gone, carried off to her in-laws' farm on a horse caparisoned with tin bells and red velvet. The groomsmen tote her in their arms from the hut to the saddle; during her wedding, her feet must never touch the ground.

"She didn't cry when she left, which is good," Melese says later, bleary-eyed but proud under Tihun's thorn tree. "She really didn't know where she was going."

Melese has staggered to the tree to guard the all-important family fields from goats. He waits for one of his unmarried children to relieve him.

The dust under the tree still bears Tihun's tiny footprints. And the rocks she used as jacks. Ephemeral reminders of a childhood, they will be blown away in the next windstorm.

The source: Foreign correspondent Paul Salopek has covered Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia. His reporting in the U.S. and abroad has captured two Pulitzer Prizes. Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune