Despite many challenges, 11-year-old sponsored child Tarikayehu Sali avoids early marriage and stays in school.

August 2007

By Tilahun Bekele, Networking and Marketing Coordinator, and Janet Root, Assistant Web Editor

"Had I not gone to school, I would have married at an early age, like my mother," says 11-year-old Tarikayehu Sali, who lives in southern Ethiopia. "My mother got married when she was my age."

Education and Opportunities

Unlike the 62 million girls not attending school across the world today, Tarikayehu is receiving an education because of her World Vision sponsorship.

It's an opportunity she doesn't take lightly. "Education is a very important thing in my life. I can help myself and be able to reach out for others, especially my parents, only when I am educated."

Even though her sponsorship enables Tarikayehu to go to school, obtaining a good education remains a huge challenge.

Challenges

The fifth grader lives in a small, rural village, some 260 miles south of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, and attends school at an old, dilapidated facility that hosts 3,500 students. Four of eight classrooms are mud-walled structures; the remaining wings are in relatively better condition, since they are built with bricks and cement.

Students go to class in two shifts — morning and afternoon. More than 100 students are crammed into each classroom, in which groups of three to four students share one desk.

With no public transportation or neighborhood carpool available, Tarikayehu walks about five miles each day, to and from school. But it's a journey she enjoys, she says, since it's shared with others. "I like to chat and laugh with my girlfriends as we travel to and from school."

No Support, Yet Big Dreams

When she's not at school, Tarikayehu helps with chores at home — fetching firewood, collecting water, making coffee, cleaning the house, and washing clothes. She also tends to her family's cattle. In the evenings, when she has some spare time, she works on her school assignments by the light of an oil lamp. Her village currently has no access to electricity.

"Neither my father nor my mother is literate, so I have to do all my studies without the support of anybody else," she says. "But sometimes I tell my mother or grandmother what I learned in the school and they listen to me, even when they do not understand what I am talking about."

Despite the many challenges she faces, Tarikayehu has large dreams. "When I grow up, I want to be an English teacher — it is education that makes me a full person!"