Posted on 07/06/2022 7:59:13 AM PDT by grundle
Kueryiek, South Sudan — There hasn't been much to sing about for months in the village of Kueryiek. But all that could change: A marriage is at hand.
Wearing a green dress and an ill-fitting wig, bride-to-be Nyekuoth Manyuan is treated like royalty. By getting married, she can save her community from starvation.
But as CBS News foreign correspondent Debora Patta reports, it comes at a terrible cost: The bride is a child, just 14 years old.
Nyekuoth Manyuan, 14, is seen on her wedding day in Kueryiek, South Sudan. CBS News
Two months ago, she had a future outside of her small village in South Sudan. She was in school, where she received not only an education, but a meal every day. But the cost of food and fuel has sky-rocketed, thanks in large part to Russia's war in Ukraine, and that has brought the school food program to an abrupt halt.
Like much of the emergency food aid provided to the millions of people on the brink of starvation in drought- and flood-wracked South Sudan, the school meals were supported by the United Nations' World Food Program (WFP).
The WFP's acting country director told CBS News the organization had to suspend aid to nearly 2 million people in South Sudan recently because the war is pushing costs up, while also sapping donations.
"It's because there are so many catastrophes blowing up across the world," Marwa Awad, the WFP's head of communications in South Sudan, told CBS News.
She said the humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, Yemen and now Ukraine have been a double-edged sword, leaving WFP with "less money to feed more and more people."
Many in Nyekuoth's village have been surviving by eating water lilies, but at least the kids were being fed at school. When the cash-strapped WFP had to suspend that program, it left parents like hers to choose between food, or an education for their children.
While Nyekuoth's father negotiated with the prospective groom's family over the value of his daughter's hand in marriage, the village women waited for news and Nyekuoth herself sat looking tired, seemingly resigned to her fate.
"I know I'm young," she told Patta. "But the food's been taken away, and I want my family to survive on the dowry they will get."
Her father Manyuan Kerena laid a row of sticks down in front of the head of the other family, each one representing a cow. He wanted 100 in exchange for his daughter.
"It hurts," admitted the father. "The cows we are getting are hardly worth it. But we are afraid. We don't have anything to eat."
Others watch as Manyuan Kerena (right foreground) negotiates with a prospective groom (2nd from left) over the price of a dowry for his 14-year-old daughter in the village of Kueryiek, South Sudan. CBS News
After several hours a deal was struck. Cow bells rang out and there was dancing and singing. But times are tough. The family agreed to marry Nyekuoth off for just 60 poorly fed cattle.
In exchange, the groom — more than a decade older at 25 — got to take Nyekuoth home that night.
Patta asked her if it would be difficult to go with her new husband.
"No, it will never be difficult," she said, "because I want them to be alive."
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Nyekuoth Manyuan, 14, is seen in her village of Kueryiek, South Sudan, without the makeup and wig she put on later for her arranged marriage to a 25-year-old man. She was sold into marriage by her starving family for a dowry of 60 cattle. CBS News
"You should not choose between food — your right to food — and your right to education. This must not be a choice facing a child at 14 years of age, or her family or her larger community," the WFP's Awad told CBS News. She knows that Nyekuoth is not a unique case.
"There's so many others," she told Patta. "We're noticing a big drop in attendance in the schools."
"It makes me feel partly ashamed that I'm unable to help as an individual, and at the same time as an organization," Awad said. "We're doing the best that we can, but honestly, the solution is that people do not forget South Sudan. This is the solution, because there are still many lives that can thrive if help is given."
It costs only about $15 dollars per month to feed a school child in South Sudan. For the price of four or five cups of coffee, a child can be ensured an education, and options beyond early parenthood.
Nyekuoth loves science and dreams of being a doctor, but her story is evidence of the many ways that hunger can destroy a life.
Slavery only offends Communists from 150 years ago.
Perhaps the bells and whistles are different but such arranged, forced marriages for economic advantage have happened and continue to happen throughout the world and even in the “enlightened” West.
Talk of dowries and selling your daughter into an arranged marriage, is just beyond the frame of reference for many of us.
Life is very different in many parts of the world.
But all cultures are equal, right? Disgusting.
Way too old for gropey’s tastes, but Hunter likes ‘em about that age.
It would be so much better if she could take the Western Progressive route, and sell herself to criminal and drug-smuggling gangs who would take her across the atlantic, march her through central America, across open US borders through the desert, and then put her in sexual slavery in the USA.
No Sale.
I didn’t read far enough to find out if it was climate change, Trump, or capitalism to blame.
Fourteen in them parts is an old hag.
Too funny!
Part of the issue is that the massive amount of government assistance to countries like this has put the regular farmers out of business or down to subsistence levels. They cannot compete against free.
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/03/world/even-with-peace-and-rain-ethiopia-fears-famine.html
Additionally, local armed groups steal or destroy what the villages have to force political or population changes.
https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/politics-famine-ethiopia
Sudan has just as many issues as Ethiopia but the MSM has not been as quick to report on it, just the Russia-Ukraine nexus stories.
and they keep telling me all cultures are equal
i raised three girls, and would rob the world to feed them
selling them is a wholly alien concept that never would have entered my mind...
Pedophiles would like that here - for both sexes...
I’m not sure what CBS is wanting as a response to this. Are we supposed to be horrified by their backward culture? That would be odd for a liberal outlet.
Are we supposed to feel bad that this is what is required for survival? If so, the history of humanity is not a pretty picture
Are we supposed to feel bad so that we will want open borders so that these people can come to America so they can celebrate Pride Month? Probably.
“But the cost of food and fuel has sky-rocketed, thanks in large part to Russia’s war in Ukraine...”
They just can’t stop, can they? Neocon propaganda every day, every hour, 24/7.
FJB CHILD TRAFFICKER.
But all cultures are the same
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