Maria washes clothes. © CARE / Mazari Waziri.After the death of her father, Maria and her siblings moved in to their uncle’s home. When Maria was 14, her cousin killed a person and the family of the murdered man asked for a girl as compensation. Although her cousin has sisters, they gave Maria as compensation.
Maria said, “When I was busy washing the dishes one of my cousins called me and said, “leave the dishes, we have engaged you to someone, we finalised your marriage contract and now your husband’s family is coming to take you to their home.”
“I spent 18 months with my husband and after that they sent him to Iran to work there as an unskilled laborer. My husband’s family was threatening me all the time and was saying ‘you are from a murderer’s family, we don’t pity you; you are as a slave for us.’ They provided me only a little food while I was pregnant. I gave birth to a child, but my husband hadn’t returned from Iran, so they expelled me from the house.
“I returned back to my uncle’s house; here I also faced violence. Again I returned to my husbands’ home. When my son was six months old my husband returned from Iran.
“When my husband returned from Iran he had changed, and we started a good and friendly life, which was not acceptable to my in-laws. They expelled us from their house. We took refuge in Iran, but after some time they came to Iran, started their atrocities there too, and tried to create tension between us. We spent ten years in Iran.
“We returned to Kabul because my cousins were trying to sell my father’s house. The house sold and I was given a tiny fraction of the proceeds.
“I put a down-payment on a new house for us, but I was not aware that my husband was a drug addict. He took all the money from the property dealer. When I went to the property dealer he provided me the documents that showed my husband had taken the money. I asked what I should do with my five children, with no shelter and no income.
“My husband’s health got worse – he became like a madman, and three years ago he disappeared. The only way for me to earn a living was to wash people’s clothes.
Maria joined a CARE group. “I participated in all meetings of the group and transferred what I learnt about women’s and children’s rights and family law to other women as we washed people’s clothes. For my own inheritance I went to the Human Rights Commission; they hired an advocate for me and finally I got three acres of my inheritance land from my brothers-in-law.
“CARE recognised my hard work and the project hired me as a Community Mobiliser. I have been working, my children are going to school, I have enough income and I’m proud of this. I found that a woman is not helpless; a woman is the key to her own development when she is aware and supported.”
