Amani has just turned 22. Two months ago she fled from Syria and left her house in capital Damascus. After a long dangerous trip she arrived at Zaatari, the refugee camp on the border in Jordan, where her parents and two sisters had already lived for more than a year.
In Damascus she lived with her husband and five children in an apartment in the old city centre. Like many Syrian girls she got married when she was still a child. She had just turned 15 when she had to wed.
“In Syria things are different,” she tells IPS. “Girls get married very early; it is a tradition. But it doesn’t mean we are all married off to strangers. I got to choose my husband and he got to choose me. We could never be more happy than when we were together.”
There was a deadly attack on their apartment killed her husband and four of her children. Amani escaped and only managed to save her youngest daughter. She took the dangerous trip from Damascus to the refugee camp. But life in Zaatari was anything but a relief.
“We are locked up like monkeys in a cage. The moment you walk into the camp, there is no way out any more.” The camp is overpopulated. A sea of tents spans 3.3 square kilometers, accommodating 150,000 refugees it is three times the number it was built for almost two years ago.
An entire underground economy has taken root in the camp. The struggle for food is fierce, and only a lucky few earn enough money to sustain a family.
“I work seven days a week, at least 10 hours a day, for an NGO that takes care of the smallest children here in the camp. After working an entire week, I get three dollars. With an ill mother, an elderly father and a baby to take care of, this life is unsustainable,” Amani says. “My older sister and her husband still have all their children, thank God, but this means five extra mouths to feed.”
Nourishing a family of ten with only three dollars a week is almost impossible. Amani brought her younger sister, Amara, to work at the same NGO. But doubling the income was still not enough to take care of all of them.
There was only one way to get money quickly, a path that many families took before Amani did. That was to as good as sell one of the girls. Amani sent off her younger sister Amara, 14, to some kind of marriage. “I have seen Jordanians, Egyptians and Saudis passing by the tents in search of a virgin to take with them. They pay 300 dollars, and they get the girl of their dreams.”
Amani says she had no choice. “I knew she did not love that man but I knew that at least he would take care of her. I would have sold myself, but Amara was the only virgin in our family. We had to sell her, in order to allow the rest of us survive. What else could I do?”
Amara was married to a Saudi man that passed by their tent and asked her father for her hand. That was after he had met Amani, who had told him of the family’s financial desperation and that her younger sister was still not married off. With this marriage Amani secured critical money for her family, at least for a short time.
Source: ALTERNETWORK
MNA
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