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News - Weddings
| Cheap mobile calls help more young couples elope |
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| Posted by lily on Nov 06, 2009 @ 08:46 | |||||||||||
| MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Somali courtship was different in Hassan Aden's day. When he was a teenager, you gave the girl's parents 11 camels and an AK-47 assault rifle as bride price and then waited respectfully. Now, the 55-year-old said, a mobile phone service that seems to be the only thing working in the failed Horn of Africa state is helping drive a rise in elopements, pregnancies out of marriage and a steady erosion of Somalia's conservative values. "The youth of today enjoy modern technology, fast transportation and free-of-charge marriages," Aden, a store owner, told Reuters at a coffee shop in the capital Mogadishu. "Today, even reasonable boys pay just $50 bride price and a copy of the holy Koran after making the girl pregnant or seeing her secretly for months." In a drought-ravaged land where rebels are trying to topple a fragile government, gun battles break out almost daily and nearly 20,000 civilians have been killed since the start of 2007, cheap mobile commun .. . | |||||||||||
| Topic: Weddings | |||||||||||
| Tags: hell on earth, marriage, somalia | |||||||||||
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