11-year-old Fayrouz Ahmed Haider. Her father married her to help pay for her mother's hospital bills.
I met Fayrouz Ahmed Haider in a grim refugee camp in Yemen. Just 11 years old, she was already married. She reminded me of someone else: a girl I had met thousands of miles away in the West African nation of Niger.
Her name was Balki Souley. Like Fayrouz, she had also been married off as a child.
I met Balki in the summer of 2012. She had just lost her son during childbirth, and her body was frail, so weakened by hunger, that she nearly died herself. Balki was 14 then. She was married at 12.
At the time, Balki's father was struggling to scrape together enough money to take care of his 15-member family. There wasn't nearly enough to feed them.
"Sometimes we had food, sometimes we didn't eat," he said. "Whenever we had leftovers, we gave them to Balki. If her hunger wasn't satisfied, there's nothing we could do."
Balki Souley, 14, in the village of Kwassaw, Niger, on June 17, 2012.
Then, as it is the case now, Niger has the world's highest rate of child marriage. Back then, a hunger crisis was affecting millions of people across the Sahel region. Humanitarian agencies were concerned that more and more desperate parents would marry off their daughters for the dowries they fetch to ensure their family's survival.
In Yemen, the civil war is doing just that.
In Balki, I saw Fayrouz's potential future. Fayrouz was married off to a 25-year-old man, and his dowry was used for medical treatment for her mother and to pay off debts. But when the man tried to have sex with her, Fayrouz ran away. But she intends to go back to her husband, not least because her struggling family needs the rest of the dowry, which will be paid only when she returns.
"He calls me every day," Fayrouz told me, referring to her husband. "He asks me when I'll come back."
"I tell him I won't come back until I am old enough," she continued.
When I asked when that will be, Fayrouz replied:
"After a year of two, I will go back to him."
That would make her around the same age when Balki became pregnant and subsequently lost her child.
© 2016 The Washington Post
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