In our tradition, there is a ceremony that girls have to undergo to become women, and it's a rite of passage to womanhood.
And then I was just finishing my eighth grade, and that was a transition for me to go to high school.
This was the crossroad. Once I go through this tradition, I was going to become a wife. Well, my dream of becoming a teacher will not come to pass. So I talked -- I had to come up with a plan to figure these things out.
I talked to my father. I did something that most girls have never done.
I told my father, "I will only go through this ceremony if you let me go back to school."
The reason why, if I ran away, my father will have a stigma, people will be calling him the father of that girl who didn't go through the ceremony.
It was a shameful thing for him to carry the rest of his life.
So he figured out. "Well," he said, "okay, you'll go to school after the ceremony."
I did. The ceremony happened. It's a whole week long of excitement.
It's a ceremony. People are enjoying it.