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Facing Servitude, Ethiopian Girls Run for a Better Life
Meseret Defar, 22, the 2004 Olympic gold medalist in the 5,000 meters, holds her adopted 5-year-old, Maunt, left, and a relative, Nardos Mesfin. Defar has become an icon for many young Ethiopian women who have begun running in hopes of competing.
(By Emily Wax -- The Washington Post)
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Ethiopia, an impoverished country of 73 million, also has one of the largest caseloads of AIDS in the world, forcing many girls to quit school and care for a sick or widowed relative. Since few homes have running water or electricity, cooking and cleaning take most of day.
There are also cultural taboos against girls walking long distances through desolate bush to school. Parents fear rape and abduction, which are often carried out as a way to force a girl into marriage.
"Teenage girls in Africa are the most vulnerable population in the world," said Alessandro Conticini, who heads the child protection and HIV/AIDS sections at the UNICEF office here. "They do more work than their brothers. They are far more vulnerable to dropping out and being forced into domestic labor . . . forced marriages, prostitution."
Conticini said conditions in Ethiopia were slowly improving, "but ultimately, girls need a good reason to sway parents that they should be allowed to go to school and delay work and marriage."
So far, running has proved a powerful incentive. Even in the most traditional rural enclaves, parents see the benefit in allowing girls to train, which means they must attend school because coaches pick race contestants.
Children here are expected to support parents in their old age, and girls who run are often economically successful because they lead disciplined lives, said ElShadai Negash, editor of Endurance, a sports magazine in Addis Ababa.
"For a girl, being able to run is a real statement of freedom that actually turns into power," Negash said. "Female runners are idols in part because of their financial success. If that girl can become a respectable earner, then why not delay marriage? She's seen as an investment, after all."
Many Ethiopian girls develop strength at an early age from doing hours of chores, walking three or four miles a day to fetch water and attend school, and carrying loads of firewood on their heads.
While boys spend time with their fathers, running errands or hanging out, girls are responsible for helping their mothers with demanding chores, from mashing fruit for juice to cleaning carpets by hand.
Meseret Defar, who won an Olympic gold medal in 2004 in the 5,000 meters and a silver in the 2005 world championships, said she spent her childhood carrying wood so heavy that she developed strong back muscles by age 10.
"I would also carry clay pots filled with water for two miles every day," Defar recounted at a cafe here. "I used to cry because all I wanted to do was train and run, but I had to do household chores."
Though barely five feet tall, she proved to be an astonishingly fast runner, and eventually got the attention of her father and coaches at school. Even then, however, she had to secretly borrow her brothers' sneakers.
