Wedding and daughter's naming ceremony on the same day

ROLPA, June 18: On June 4, Sita (name changed), a tenth grader in one of the local schools of western Rolpa started suffering from extreme abdominal pain in the middle of the class. Her teacher prepared to send her to a nearby health post but she insisted going home instead. Later, she was given permission to go home with one of her friends. Her home was a two-hour walk from the school; she started yelling with pain on the way.

Then her friend called Sita's elder brother who immediately came to pick her up on his motorcycle. On the way, Sita asked her brother to stop the motorbike saying she needed to urinate. After a while, her brother was shocked to hear the cries of a baby from the place where his sister had gone to urinate. The brother felt as if he had fallen from the sky when he learned that his unmarried 16 years old sister had given birth to a baby. He immediately called the principal of another local school who happened to be his relative too. 

The principal arrived there, carrying a piece of cloth. "When he arrived here, the newborn was lying on the dusty ground, next to her mother," said Bhan Bahadur Gharti, chairperson of the rural municipality. According to him, the principal had no option to chopping the umbilical cord with a stone. The mother and the newborn were taken to a health post with the help of some locals. "It took a lot of time to reach the health post," Gharti added.People immediately gathered at the health post after hearing about the incident. The girl said, the baby had been delivered in eight months. "The newborn weighed only 1,900 grams and was covered with dust. It was found that the umbilical cord had been cut off with the help of stones," said Sharada Dangi, a health worker at Gaurigaun Tila Health Post.People started discussing about the father of the newborn. Sita mentioned the name of an 11th grader from Dang who over the phone accepted that he was the father of he newborn. The newborn handed over to the boy and his family. "They got married on the occasion of the naming ceremony of their daughter," said Khimbabu Raj DC, chief of the ward. He also said that this isn't the first time such an incident has happened in this village.Locals say a large number of school going children are married off in Ropla every year. According to one of the classmates of Sita, these days students misuse the mobile phones for watching porn. "This makes them sexually vulnerable and as premarital sex is not acceptable in our society, either they get married or do it secretly," said Sita's classmate.

 
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