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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
6:15 am – Qello, 13, is the second of four children in a family of farmers in the rural village of Dodota Denbel. Every morning, she is the first one to get up to collect firewood from the forest near her house.
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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
6:45 am – When she returns home with the wood, Qello prepares coffee. In accordance with tradition, chores are also considered as a kind of “training” in domestic skills that girls will need once they get married and have to take care of your own home.
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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
7:15 am – Qello washes herself with soap and water. “I have helped at home since I was little, but now that Chaltu (her older sister, 19) married and had her baby, most chores rely on me”.
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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
7:30 am – After preparing breakfast and cleaning the house, Qello gets ready to go to school. She can only go after the chores are finished, so sometimes she is late or has to skip class.
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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
8:15 am – 5 girls share a desk at Dodota Dembel’s Public School. Poverty means that many families find themselves having to marry off the girls whose upkeep they can no longer afford. “More than half of Qello’s classmates will be married off before they reach adulthood, if they aren’t already married. And, unfortunately, they will all end up leaving their studies shortly after the wedding”, explains Ana Sendagorta, Director of the Pablo Horstmann Foundation.
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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
8:00 am – Qello pays attention in class. The girls’ education is a challenge because many families see little point in educating their daughters and prioritise the schooling of their male children. According to UNICEF, less than half (47%) of girls can read and write.
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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
11:45 am – When she comes back from school, Qello prepares the food for her family. The unequal distribution of chores un-dertaken by girls are a double burden since they also limit the girls’ ambitions and potential, making them believe that domestic duties are the only ones they are qualified for.
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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
11:50 am – Qello prepares teff flour. Aided only with a stone, the process takes a long time. In the rural communities of Ethiopia, the injera, a sort of bread made with this flour, is the base of the diet.
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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
12:30 pm – Qello waits for his father to finish eating so she can wash the dishes. “Girls’ dreams and ambition are crushed by the expectations and social pressure imposed on them as girls: if they don’t learn how to look after a home they will never find a husband, which is what is expected of them”, says Claudia Guidarini, Gender Advisor at Save the Children.
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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
13:45 pm – Qello queues at the line of the local well. There is only one well for the whole village, and often that means that she has to wait for hours under the blazing sun.
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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
14:30 – After a long wait it is finally Qello’s turn at the well.
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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
16:00 pm – The journey back home takes longer since the donkey has a heavier load to carry through uneven paths. Travelling long distan¬ces alone exposes many girls to physical or sexual violence. Despite the risk, every day thousands of girls in Ethiopia have to spend hours getting water for their families.
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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
16:30 pm – Once back at home, Qello helps her father in the small corn farm of the family. Qello’s family, like most in the rural communities of Ethiopia, is directly dependent on small-scale farming to survive.
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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
18:00 pm – Before the end of the day, Qello still has chores to do, like doing the laundry.
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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
18:45 pm – At the end of the day, when all the chores are done, Qello finds some time do her homework and study with the help of a small lamp.
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© 2021 Ignacio Marin
21:00 pm – Nightime at Qello’s house. “For thousands of girls, each day is a sequence of domestic chores that leaves them no time to study or play. This limits their access to education and its development, and perpetuates gender roles, in addition to being a particularly invisible kind of child labor”, says Blanca Carazo, Responsible for Programs and Emergencies at UNICEF Spanish Committee.
Public Story
Profession: girl
Credits:
ignacio marin
Date of Work:
11/05/17 - 12/03/17
Updated: 04/10/21
PROFESSION: GIRL
In Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in Africa, to be a girl is a full time job. According to a report from Unicef, Ethiopia ranks second by the number of hours girls spend doing on household chores: over 22h per week.
Here, being born a girl means a lifetime of fetching water, cooking, cleaning, collecting firewood or taking care of younger siblings. For these girls, the burden of domestic work begins early and intensifies as they reach adolescence. As a result, girls sacrifice opportunities to grow, play and enjoy their childhood but it also burdens their education and future potential and exposes them to physical and sexual violence.
This unequal distribution of labour among children contributes to the construction of girls identities and how they perceive their role into society. As such, girls are raised to believe that their work is less valuable than that of their male brothers and that their place is at the house doing domestic duties, what limit their ambitions and future potential.
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Dodota Dembel, Ethiopia
November 2017
© Ignacio Marin
