The courage of Nujood Ali

Some stories deserve to be told.
This is one of them.

For those who have never heard about this young girl, Nujood Ali, you need to read her story. It's a story of courage. A story about a 10 year old girl who did something unprecedented and a started a revolution in her country.

Read her story...

Written last year by Glamour Magazine after Nujood's divorce...

At first glance, you’d never guess that Nujood Mohammed Ali is Yemen’s most famous divorcee. She is slight, with a shy smile and coffee-color eyes. Ask what makes her laugh and she says, “My divorce.” What else? Tom and Jerry cartoons—she is, after all, just 10 years old. Nevertheless, last year Nujood became Yemen’s first child bride to legally end her marriage. “I wanted to protect myself,” she says, “and other girls like me.”

Yemen is full of child brides. Roughly half of Yemeni girls are married before 18, some as young as eight. Child marriage, common in South Asia, sub- Saharan Africa and Middle-Eastern countries such as Yemen, is dangerous for brides and their children.

Before her marriage, Nujood loved school—specifically math and Quran classes—and made her father promise not to pull her out to be wed. But when she was nine, her parents arranged a husband for her. Nujood was dazzled by her wedding presents: three dresses; perfume; two hairbrushes; and two hijabs, or women’s head scarves. The groom, a 30-year-old courier, gave her a $20 ring, which Nujood says he soon took back to buy clothes for himself.

She tells her story sitting on a grubby mattress in one of two rooms shared by her nine family members in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital. A bare bulb illuminates a clock on the wall. It’s nearly midnight, but Nujood’s beloved Haifa, nine, is still selling gum on the street corner. Their father, Ali Mohammed Ahdal, a former street sweeper, has 16 children, two wives, and no job.

Poverty often leads to child marriage since a typical Yemeni earns about $900 a year, and marrying off girls means fewer mouths to feed. Then there is a question of honor. One of Nujood’s sisters had been raped, another kidnapped. When her father heard the kidnapper was eyeing Nujood, he thought marriage would save her. Instead, she says, she was beaten by in-laws, and nights were a hellish game of tag, with Nujood running from room to room to escape sex with her husband; he raped her anyway.

In the fall of 2008 Nujood was recognized as Glamour Magazine's Woman of the Year, alongside some of the world's most impressive women. She even attended the ceremony in New York and was applauded by women from Hillary Clinton to Nicole Kidman.

"I didn't want to sleep with him but he forced me to, he hit me, insulted me" said Nujood. She said being married and living as a wife at such a young age was sheer torture.

Nujood described how she was beaten and raped and how, after just a few weeks of marriage, she turned to her family to try to escape the arrangement. But her parents told her they could not protect her, that she belonged to her husband now and had to accept her fate.

Two months after her wedding, Nujood returned to her family’s house to visit her sister. When her parents left for the day, Nujood did something virtually unheard-of in Yemen: She went out by herself and took a bus to Sana’a’s main court. All morning she waited, until a judge saw her sitting there. “I want a divorce,” Nujood told him.

The story of Nujood’s audacity spread to Shada Nasser, a human rights lawyer. “I didn’t believe it,” she says. She asked why the girl needed a divorce. Nujood’s reply: “I hate the night.” Nasser agreed to take the case free of charge. “But you must smile,” she said, “and you must trust me.”

Nujood’s is only one of Nasser’s high-profile cases. When the 44-year-old started her career in the 1990s, hers was the first female law office in Sana’a. Nasser built her practice by offering free services to imprisoned women. “Yemeni women have few rights,” Nasser says, “and they don’t know those they do have.”

Women like Nasser are vital in Yemen, which has one of the world’s lowest rankings for gender equality, according to the United Nations. In Sana’a, women’s faces are usually hidden behind scarves, and walking or driving alone can be dangerous; only one in four Yemeni girls makes it to secondary school, leading to an estimated 65 percent female illiteracy rate.

Yemeni law allows girls of any age to wed, but it forbids sex with them until the indefinite time they’re “suitable for sexual intercourse.” In court, Nasser argued that Nujood’s marriage violated law, since she was raped. When Nujood took the stand, “the judge asked if she wanted to resume the marriage after a ‘rest’ for three or five years,” recalls Nasser. “No,” Nujood said, “I hate this man, and I hate this marriage. Let me continue my life and go to school.”

A week after Nujood’s trip to court, the judge granted her historic divorce. Her story made world news; more critically, it reached other child brides like Nujood—and many of them have since asked for divorces of their own.

But based on the principles of Shariah law, her husband was compensated, not prosecuted. Nujood was ordered to pay him more than $200 -- a huge amount in a country where the United Nations Development Programme says 15.7 percent of the population lives on less than $1 a day.

To get her divorce, Nujood showed a character and strength not easily expressed by women in Yemen, let alone a 10-year-old child bride.

Wow right?

I don't know what to write after that.

Amazing story.