8,9,10,11,12 Year Old Mothers

Yes there are very young mothers in Malawi but in this entry I am referring to the thousands of young girls that are forced to become mothers everyday, caring for their younger siblings after their mother’s pass away. (This problem affects boys as well, but the burden falls much more heavily on the girls)Over the last couple of weeks, I (Melissa) have been trying to teach three young girls, now mothers, how to read and write. The three girls are 12, 14 and 15. Two of them are cousins and are at St. Mary’s looking after newborn twins, Yonah and Yohane. The girls are here for about one year watching over the babies until they are old enough to be left here.

During this year the young girls do not attend school but watch the two babies. Whether or not they were in school before is questionable, given their lack of knowledge coupled with evident poverty and recent illness of their late mother. Regardless, seeing these young girls taking care of these babies day in and day out is heart wrenching. It is such a stark contrast to the children living around them at St. Mary’s whose days are filled with school and play. These girls’ days are filled with babies, babies and more babies. They have no time for school and not time for play.

The real question for me is what does this mean for their future and how many more are there just like them, maybe even worse off then them? It is impossible to even begin to think about what these girls go through, first they have to deal with their mother’s death which in Malawi means you are an orphan because men remarry quickly and often abandon their children from previous marriages. Then they are left, at such a young age, to care for their younger siblings, uneducated and poor.

In the classroom these girls are shy and embarrassed. All three did not know how to spell their names, and we had one whole lesson on figuring them out. There is not much more to say about this other than it is just not fair, and with each passing day more and more young girls and even some boys are ending up as mothers and fathers, with no other choice than trying to survive and provide for their younger siblings.