Oh 8 year-olds, you're not ready for marriage

If I had a dollar for every Yemeni 8 year-old in a marriage she didn’t want that I read about this morning, I’d officially have one dollar.

A Yemeni court on Tuesday granted a divorce to an eight-year-old girl whose unemployed father forced her into an arranged marriage this year, saying he feared she might be kidnapped.

“I am happy that I am divorced now. I will be able to go back to school,” Nojud Mohammed Ali said, after a public hearing in Sanaa’s court of first instance.

Nojud was a second grader in primary school when the marriage took place two and a half months ago.

“They asked me to sign the marriage contract and remain in my father’s house until I was 18. But a week after signing, my father and my mother forced me to go live with him.”

Nojud’s father, Mohammad Ali Al-Ahdal, said he had felt obliged to marry off his daughter, an act he claims she consented to.

He said he was frightened after his oldest daughter had been kidnapped several years ago and later married to her abductor. He said the same man then kidnapped another of his daughters who was already married and had four children, resulting in him being jailed.

When I was 8 years old, I was already playing high-stakes games of craps where the money was big, the lies were bigger and no one could be trusted. Especially Manuel, the mustachioed gentleman in the red vest who controlled the tables. He ruled with an iron fist (or “eye-ron feast” as he would see in his charmingly eloquent way). Long story short, I thought things were going to be great when he won me in a game. But there’s only so many times you can get a bottle of tequila thrown at you after you mess up an enchilada because your child forearms aren’t strong enough to flip the tortilla before you realize that love isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Siiiiiigh.

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