Little Akila has no idea she’s been sold.
But she doesn’t have a choice anyway — her family is starving.
They are among thousands struggling through the drought devastating Afghanistan, which is forcing more families from their homes than the war has.
Akila is being sold to a man with a 10-year-old boy for $ 3,000.
Her mom Mamareen won’t even see the money for years because that man is poor, too.
So far she’s got just $ 70.
Theirs is among many horror stories from the Badghis region as families face unimaginable choices to avoid starvation.
In another case, a four-year-old girl was sold to a 20-year-old man to settle a debt.
Mamareen said it was like selling a piece of her heart.
She lost her husband in the war and now lives in a tent city after fleeing her drought-stricken village with her three children.
“I came here thinking that I will receive some assistance, but I got nothing,” she told CNN.
“I had no money, no food and no breadwinner.”
“She doesn’t know that I have sold her. How would she know? She is a child. But I had no other choice. Whether in tears or laughter, she will have to go. Who would sell a piece of her heart unless they really have to?”
The worst drought Afghanistan has seen in years has dried up what meager crops there were, killed off livestock and forced hundreds of thousands to abandon their farms.
They’ve had the lowest snowfall and rain in more than 17 years.
The United Nations estimates that two million people in 20 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces are at serious risk.
In the region where Mamareen and her family live at least 450,000 people face food and water shortages.
If they’re not selling children, hungry families have sold their livestock at extremely low prices so they can buy food.
Nazoo, 36, makes eight naan bread every day and that’s all her five children eat with some tea or water.
Making their plight even worse is the prospect of a harsh winter.
A woman named Sultana, 24, recently had to bury her youngest daughter, who froze to death in the Afghan desert at just three months old.
“We came here and slept in the open with nothing but a tarpaulin over our head. My daughter first got pneumonia. Then she died,” the young mother says, crying.
Temperatures last month dropped close to zero degrees at night.
“We fear that cold and hungry children will be hit by winter illnesses leading to entirely preventable deaths,” warns Chris Nyamandi, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s country director in Afghanistan.
“We cannot abandon Afghanistan at this critical junction. Better shelters must be built, and food stocks put in place, so families can survive the freezing months ahead. We have to ensure Afghans survive this winter despite the odds.”