<>Week 7- Culture<>

“When I went back to school, things were different. Girls I use to know had left; when I asked about it, people shrugged and said they had probably gone to be married. This had happened before, from time to time; even in primary school, one girl left because she was betrothed. Somehow, though, I had never really noticed before.
Now I saw Latifa, one of the Arab girls from the coast, had suddenly disappeared from our classroom. According to Halwa, one Saturday afternoon Latifa’s father told her that she was never going back to school; the time had come for her to become a woman. A classmate had been invited to Latifa’s wedding, and she talked about it. The groom was older, from Mombasa; there had been lots of presents. Latifa had looked frightened; she had cried, and her tears stained the dress she wore, which had been stiff and white.” (pg 77)

For this week, I went back to where I had found a slew of cultural differences because a lot of what Ayaan experiences at this age is much different from what is experienced by American adolescents. After Ayaan’s injury from her mother beating her at home and her teacher beating her in school, she needed a lot of time to recover (ending up to be described as several years so that her wounds could adequately heal). Later, when she returned to school, she observes that many of her classmates have been married off already, explaining their disappearance from the classroom. It surprised me that Ayaan was surprised at this, because in one’s own culture, things are more of a norm and marrying off in high school isn’t any different than the beatings that go on in the classroom, etc. This is just so very different from what occurs in the lives of high school students in America in 2008. If any student were to take a few years off due to injury (this would be unlikely due to the extent that students are catered to with adaptations so that missing school is not the first option—maybe even the last!) and return about two years later, they would not find that their classmates have been married off. Instead they may find that some people have switched schools to better meet their academic or artsy needs, and once in a very rare while will there be a pregnancy, but often those girls try and return to school. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to learn that my female classmates were married off while they were between the ages of 15 and 19. This is a huge cultural difference between what is acceptable for stopping the education that is a blessing in the first place to leave and fulfill duties as a woman of Allah.