Читать книгу Free The Children - Craig Kielburger - Страница 11
ОглавлениеI had been assigned seat 3B. The KLM flight attendant checked the blue dog tag around my neck identifying me as an unaccompanied minor, and insisted on leading me by my hand to the seat. Slowly and deliberately, she went through all the emergency procedures. When she had finished, she leaned over and demonstrated how to buckle my seat belt. She was back in a few minutes, asking if everything was all right. Just before take-off she appeared again, this time with a colouring book and crayons. I politely declined.
I looked out the window as the 747 pulled away from the terminal buildings. Soon we were airborne, and below me was a steady stream of tiny cars. In one of those is my family, I thought—a family I won’t see for seven weeks. My mother probably still had tears in her eyes. I recalled my parents’ final words: “Call us each time you change locations or when you arrive in a new city. We have to know where you are at all times.”
The cars grew smaller and smaller. A strange feeling grew inside me, an uncertainty mixed with intense excitement. The cars below merged into the fabric of the sprawling city, a carpet of life, and then even that was gone.
It was dark when the plane landed in Amsterdam. After everyone else had deplaned, a flight attendant appeared, examined my charming dog tag, and escorted me off the plane. She directed me to one of the electric carts and we drove off, weaving a path through groups of passengers, honking the horn. I thought, This isn’t so bad after all!
We pulled up to a door marked “UM.”
“Unaccompanied minor,” she noted.
She opened the door and led me inside. “Craig, you have eight hours until your flight departs.” She smiled. “Enjoy yourself.”
A virtual prisoner. For eight hours. I looked around the room. A five- year-old sat in the middle of the floor surrounded by Lego. The Little Princess was on TV. I looked at the other videotapes: The Lion King, Aladdin, Beverly Hills Cop II.
In desperation I watched them all, and watched at least twenty kids come and go. One girl from Montreal recognized me from a television interview. She was close to my own age, so we talked and looked at bits of the movies until she left to catch her flight. There was nobody else, it seemed, going to Dhaka.
Finally I was escorted to the departure gate. The terminal was packed with travellers. At the gate I was taken straight to the front of the line and was the first passenger to go aboard. As a kid alone, I really stood out. People probably assumed I was the son of some businessperson or foreign diplomat.
For the first time since leaving Toronto, I was feeling nervous. I was going to a strange and distant country where I certainly wouldn’t be able to slip unnoticed into the crowd. I began to miss my parents, and hoped Alam would be there to meet me the minute I arrived.
A flight attendant came by and reviewed in detail all the safety procedures, including the operation of my seat-belt. This time, however, my thick guidebook to Asia, open on my knees, seemed to ward off the colouring book and crayons.
The other passengers streamed aboard, and as soon as the plane was in the air, and the seat-belt sign went dark, they were up and out of their seats laughing with one another, walking around, introducing themselves to other passengers, chattering away as if they were old friends. This is definitely not Canada, I thought.
Two meals were served on the flight to Bangladesh. I decided to go for the Western-style meal the first time, since I wasn’t sure when I would have that choice again. For the later meal, I decided to take the plunge and try the Asian selection. I ate it slowly, using my fork to sample a small bit at a time. To my delight, it was all interesting and tasty. In fact, I liked it a lot better than the first meal. I took that as a positive sign.
After ten hours we landed in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It was the morning of December 11; twenty-eight hours had passed since I left Toronto.
I had never seen such a place as the Dhaka airport. As I walked through the arrivals lounge, my eye caught a cockroach scurrying across the floor. Hundreds of mysterious faces rushed about, many shrouded in dark clothing. People were smoking everywhere, and the fans overhead had stopped dead. The sultry air smelled of sweat. I hadn’t had a shower in over two days and I didn’t smell any better myself.
The place was chaotic. Two 747s had just landed. People were pushing and shoving their way to the Immigration lines to present their passports and papers before any more planes arrived. When I reached the lines, they wound on ahead, almost forever. Fortunately, a KLM agent led me to the checkpoint reserved for the flight crew.
I placed my passport, visa, ticket and boarding pass onto the counter in front of the Immigration official.
“Reason, time, and place that you will be staying while here?” he asked in an accent so thick I could barely understand him.
Alam and the local organizations had instructed me not to say that I was here to do research on child labour. “Visiting friends,” I told him.
He peered at me, but didn’t bother to take issue with it. He handed back my documents and I was free to move on.
It took several minutes for my bags to arrive, and the flight attendant who had been standing by me all this time was getting a bit irritated. It was obvious she had other business to attend to. “Are you sure you checked two bags?” she asked.
I showed her my luggage tags. The area was crowded with people jostling each other to get to their bags, and there seemed to be a severe shortage of luggage carts. Arguments were breaking out all around me.
The whole idea of the unaccompanied-minor procedure is that young passengers are protected from abduction. The attendant was to leave me only when someone arrived with proper identification and matched the description of Alam that my parents had provided. But as soon as my bags arrived, the attendant scribbled something on a clipboard, rushed me into the main airport lounge, and abandoned me. “Have a nice stay,” she said, disappearing into the crowd.
I was on my own in the middle of Asia. Alam was nowhere to be seen. What was I to do now? I could feel my anxiety level rise several notches. I piled all my bags onto a luggage cart and looked around.
“Where is Alam?” I said out loud. Had he forgotten when my plane was due? Had he got into an accident? Should I call my parents?
I slowly scanned the crowd in the airport. The people were mostly Asian, a few of them in Western clothing, but no Alam.
One man asked me if I needed a hotel. Someone else kept asking if Lucinda was travelling with me.
“No.” I shook my head. “There is no Lucinda with me.”
He was insistent. “Where is Lucinda? Where is Lucinda?”
I got away from him and pushed the cart through a door to the outside. A wall of heat and humidity hit me. I was blinded by the intense sunlight.
I was immediately surrounded by a swarm of people, all wanting my attention. “You want a hotel?” they asked in Bengali and broken English. “Taxi, you want taxi?” Others asked for money, or held things for sale in front of my face.
One person rushed up to me and started to take one of my suitcases. “No. No taxi,” I said. I pulled it back from him. “Na!” I repeated again and again. With one hand I protected my bags as best I could, and with the other I pushed the cart away from them along a walkway. There I found a little peace and time to recover.
When I left Canada, there was snow on the ground. Here, the heat was thick and overpowering, and I was very tired from the long trip. I felt sick.
But somehow, through it all, there surfaced the excitement of being in a totally foreign place. I caught sight of a vendor balancing a long rod on his shoulder. The rod was bent from the weight of the goods he carried. He was a walking store. Everything imaginable hung in bags from the rod: pots and pans, knives, cups, cigarettes, water, prayer mats. As he walked, he called out the names of the goods he had for sale.
Small food stands dotted the area outside the airport. As people left the airport they flocked to these stands, as if they’d been missing their favourite foods during their travels. The most popular food seemed to be a large leaf of some sort into which the customers piled a variety of fillings.
A massive palm tree towered over me. The air was sweet with the smell of spices and curries and charged with the rhythms of a strange exotic language.
“I can’t believe you brought so much stuff!”
It was Alam. He looked at me, a grin on his face. What a relief to see him.
“I made it,” I said, smiling broadly. “Where were you?”
“I wasn’t allowed inside. You have to have a ticket to get inside.”
With Alam there to protect my luggage, I went to look for a phone to call home and tell my parents I was safe. Immediately I gathered an audience. A white child in Bangladesh making a phone call was far from a common sight.
“I stand out like a light bulb!” I said to my mother, after reassuring her I was safe.
For the first time in my life I experienced how it felt to be part of a very small minority. Alam told me that since his arrival two weeks earlier he had seen only six white people. Almost all of them would have been diplomats or businesspeople whose children are sent to schools abroad. When the children return to be with their parents, they are taken away by private cars to their homes and are never seen out on the city streets.
Alam told me to wait with my bags while he went to negotiate a price for a couple of rickshaws to carry us to his relatives’ home. There must have been fifty rickshaws in front of the airport. They were painted in bright carnival colours and designs, as if each were trying to outdo the others in an attempt to get the customers’ attention.
Eventually a price was set and Alam waved me over. When the drivers realized I was a foreigner, they became quite agitated. They had given Alam the local price instead of the tourist one, but they had no choice but to take us. The bags were loaded in one rickshaw, and Alam and I climbed aboard the other. And off we went through the streets of Dhaka.
Rickshaws were everywhere. I felt sorry for the drivers, having to carry such a heavy load. It took a great effort just to get them rolling. The drivers weaved their way barefoot through narrow streets that were in desperate need of repair. Sweat glistened on their faces, which they wiped off with the bandannas tied around their necks.
Despite the blistering sun, I couldn’t help but lose myself in the sights all around me. Children played with a beach ball along the roadside. Cows and dogs and rats roamed freely, sniffing the garbage that littered the streets. The poverty was overwhelming. I saw children sweeping and picking up garbage, others selling food or begging.
Dhaka is the capital of Bangladesh, with a population of four million people. I knew that the city, like many major cities in Southeast Asia, faced problems of poverty, overpopulation and lack of living space. Over the years, Bangladesh’s rural economy had been devastated by a series of droughts, tropical storms and floods. Tens of thousands of people had left for the cities in search of a better life. But the cities could barely cope with the influx.
We passed many women doing laundry on the street in front of their homes. They had two tubs, one with soapy water, the other with clear. Using the pavement as a washing board, they pounded the clothes. We passed a man with a loudspeaker shouting in Bengali about a transit strike. And all around us were signs—most in Bengali, but a few in English—advertising clothes, movies and countless brands of cigarettes.
Gradually, the poorer areas gave way to well-tended gardens and apartment buildings similar to those you would see in any North American city. Several of Alam’s relatives lived together in one such apartment.
We arrived at the building to find the power out. Up four flights of stairs we trudged, dragging my bags. Partway there I stopped and looked out a window. Rows of low-rise buildings stretched to the horizon. The occasional plane landed at the airport not far away. There was very little green space. What trees and grass I could see were often on the roofs of the buildings. And dotting the hillsides around the city were the shanties, the homes of the poor.
Alam knocked loudly on the door and called out a few words in Bengali. The door was thrown open, and in he went to excited chatter and a great round of hugs.
“And this is Craig, my friend from Canada.”
They looked at me. I think that they were expecting someone older.
“Hello,” I said.
No one moved. I tried again. “Salam alaykum,” I said. Alam’s uncle smiled warmly and welcomed me into the house. Soon I was being embraced by relative after relative, from the oldest to the youngest. “Salam alaykum, salam alaykum . . . .” Within minutes I was practically one of the family.
We sat down as Alam talked on, telling what I took to be stories of his recent travels. I was hot and sticky still. Overhead, a ceiling fan hung motionless.
Alam’s aunt appeared with tall glasses of water. She passed one to me. Some parting words of my mother echoed in my head: Don’t ever drink local water without treating it with chlorine. I retrieved some from my luggage and dutifully administered two drops into the glass. I forced myself to wait the fifteen minutes for the chlorine to do its job, then I downed the water with great relief.
Not long after, the ceiling fan came to life. The television flashed on and music from a Hindi movie filled the room. Two children reappeared and dropped themselves down in front of the TV. The plot was very simple: Man falls in love with woman, woman doesn’t like man (but likes to sing, a lot), another man saves woman’s life, two men fight for her hand (woman still singing), handsome man wins, two live happily ever after (now singing together).
Eventually Alam turned to me and announced above the racket, “We have to go through your luggage. We have to decide what goes back to Canada.”
We found a place to inspect it all, and Alam dumped the contents of the first bag on the floor. He was impressed by the clothes I brought. “Perfect for the climate.” He was pleased to find in another everything he had asked me to bring for him, including track pants, books on photography and Nutri-Grain bars, one of which he opened and started to chew.
Alam was less impressed when he came across my medical kit. He stared in disbelief at the contents. There were elastic bandages in case of sprains, syringes and blood-testing equipment, and drugs for worms and for at least a dozen different ailments. There were eyedrops, painkillers, a toothache remedy, tweezers, tape, scissors, gauze, swabs, rubbing alcohol . . . the list went on and on.
“You’re a walking medicine cabinet, for goodness’ sakes!” He picked up several bottles and read the labels, then turned to me and smiled. “Your mother packed this, didn’t she?”
“She meant well.” I smiled. “It’s not that heavy.”
Alam and I boxed up more than half the contents of the bags. We would be travelling light, with the bare necessities.
Soon it was time for dinner. I was looking forward to the meal, my first cooked in an Asian home. Alam even more so, especially when his aunt pointed out that she had cooked his favourite foods. We moved into the dining room and the dishes started to appear. First came steaming bowls of curried rice. Then something called chokputi, made from chickpeas, potatoes and eggs. There was pancake-flat bread, roti, followed by dhal, a mixture of different lentils in a sauce. It looked delicious. “And not too spicy,” Alam’s aunt said to him, who passed it on to me in English.
We all sat down. All the men, that is. I asked Alam whether the women would be joining us, but he shook his head and quickly turned the conversation back to the food.
After we had finished, the women settled in our places and had their meal from what we had left. I had to take a deep breath to stop myself from making a comment. I realized the custom was part of the Bangladeshi culture, yet it seemed very unfair.
That night I lay awake, thinking about what I had done, wondering if I had made the right decision to travel halfway around the world. I looked over at Alam asleep on the couch. The day before, when we had decided what items to send back to Canada, I placed my journal in the “send home” pile. I got up, searched through the pile, and removed it. I flipped through the pages and saw the perfect blue lines still untouched by a pen. No matter how difficult the trip would become at times, I know I would always want to remember it. I opened the journal and wrote, “Day One.”
Well, I arrived at 8:26 their time. After getting my bags and going through customs, I finally left to be met by Alam. There were coconut and banana trees! It was winter! We took a rickshaw rider from the airport to the home. The poverty is overwhelming; children are working in the street, picking up garbage, begging . . . .
I thought that Alam might have scheduled a day to let me recuperate from all my travelling, but no such luck. First thing in the morning, we were off to visit a branch of PLAN International.
We met with several members of the PLAN staff, and soon my questioning turned to what their organization was doing for working children. They told me how some of their projects had significantly improved the lives of the poor.
“Would you like to see for yourself? Would you like to visit one of our projects?”
Of course. My purpose in coming to Asia was to be out with the children, to see for myself how they were living. We were taken to one of Dhaka’s largest slums. It was an experience I will never forget.
In the sweltering heat we piled out of our car onto the garbage-littered streets. The slum filled an entire valley, a maze of huts stretched away from us as far as the eye could see. It was an astonishing mass of poverty, like nothing I could ever have imagined.
I stood for a moment, numbed by the sight before me.
The huts looked fragile, most of them made of panels of woven reed, framed by sticks that were tied together. We were told the people lived in constant threat of the government bulldozing their homes to the ground. It looked to me that a strong gust of wind would flatten them even faster.
I was hit with the smell of the place. Animal and human excrement lay in the gutters. The hot sun beat down on heaps of rotting garbage, intensifying the odour to the point that I could barely keep from covering my nose.
We walked down the alleyways between the huts, occasionally peering inside one to get a better idea of how the people lived. Most dwellings were a single room, in some cases no bigger than the bathrooms of some houses back home. In a few I noticed a small fire with a pot of water over it. No electricity or plumbing. The furniture was often simple crates. Frayed and tattered rugs were scattered over the dirt floors. The only decoration seemed to be woven cloths with the simplest of designs hung on the walls. The people had virtually no possessions.
As we walked, some children tagged along. What few clothes they wore were dirt-stained and ragged. Most of the boys wore only shorts, and the youngest children nothing at all. Most had bare feet.
But they were not without their laughter. Their attention quickly centred on me. With my blond hair and almost turquoise eyes, I certainly stood out from the crowd.
“Salam alaykum,” I said to them. “Hello.”
They were surprised. They whispered and giggled, daring each other to come close to me. One brave fellow dashed up and poked my back. Before I could turn around to see his face, he had scurried away and disappeared between the shacks.
I doubt if any of them had ever seen a white child before. Certainly not one walking among their homes and wanting to talk to them. I decided to make a game out of their curiosity. I would crouch down, and when the younger children built up their courage to come within my reach, I would pounce on them and tickle them until they ran away. I did it again and again. Finally I was out of breath and sat down for a while. Some of the children came and sat next to me. We talked through an interpreter. They wanted me to come visit them again. Maybe I had more games they could play.
One young girl became our guide. She led us to a clearing. No refuse or garage was to be seen anywhere. Standing in the centre of the clearing was her community’s pride and joy: a hand pump built with the help of the local office of PLAN International. The people who lived in the slum absolutely cherished it.
The girl explained the operation of the pump, as if it were a miracle. “Once the hole had been dug, beautiful, clean, clear water rose from under the ground.” She went on to show how it worked. “It is simple. You pump the handle like this, and after about ten pumps the water begins to flow.” As if on cue, water appeared from the spout. “And then,” she said, with excitement in her voice, “it gushes out!”
The people didn’t want to lose a single drop. As soon as the pump filled one bucket, another appeared in its place. The full buckets were carried off in all directions. A team of men, we were told, was responsible for maintaining the pump and the site around it.
I tried to imagine what it must have been like before the pump was put in place. Water probably came from a great distance or, more likely, what was used was often contaminated. I couldn’t help but compare it to how freely water was used in my own home. I thought of all the swimming pools back in Thornhill, each filled with thousands of gallons of water. In Canada we think nothing of letting water drain endlessly from our kitchen taps and garden hoses. Our country is filled with lakes and rivers. We take our fresh water so much for granted.
To these people, water was a gift. It was a treasure, as precious as life itself.
Our last stop was at the house of an elderly lady of seventy or more. She was slight and wrinkled and stiff with age. Her scarred hands told of a life of hard work. But in her old age she had taken on the responsibility of caring for babies who had been abandoned, infants left on her doorstep by girls and young women who had given birth to children they couldn’t care for. We heard the babies crying in the background.
“Who will take her place once she is no longer able to care for them?” I asked. There was no answer to my question. In such a place, people learn to cope as best they can. Amid the misery there is always hope. These people were not asking for handouts. No one asked me for money or food. They merely wanted the chance to make a better life for themselves.
As we were leaving, our driver said, “This is one of the largest slums in Dhaka, but it is certainly not the worst.”
In the car, I quizzed our hosts from PLAN on the economic situation in the slums. Eighty per cent of the men who lived there made their living as rickshaw drivers. I knew from my ride from the airport that it had to be one of the most brutal and punishing jobs in the world. In exchange for his fourteen hours of work a day, a driver barely earned enough to feed his family. Most of the drivers had little hope of ever owning their own rickshaws. They were forced to rent them from a middleman, and it was to him that a large portion of their earning went.
A rickshaw costs at least ninety dollars, an incredible amount of money in a country where the average yearly income is $220. I knew what ninety dollars meant for someone living in the West, the cost of a pair of running shoes. Many Canadian parents spend five times that amount just to outfit a child for hockey.
Seeing the slum was certainly a sobering experience. But even though the situation for these people was bleak, I could see evidence of an entrepreneurial spirit, especially among the women. I discovered women at the doorways of their huts selling baskets they had made and food they had cooked. A few were carrying drinking water to nearby construction sites to sell to the workers. My guide told me of the strong bond that existed among the women who lived in the slums. I understood why projects such as the Grameen Bank,1 which gives them small loans to start their own businesses, were so successful.
My visit to the slums of Dhaka left me feeling that these people had a real spirit of cooperation and community, and caring for their neighbours. The visit had been, in a strange way, uplifting.
I had come to Asia to see as many child labourers as I could. I wanted to be there in their workplaces, seeing for myself their exact situations. The following morning I found myself at a train station, sitting on a ledge, my feet dangling over the side, simply observing everything around me.
There was a constant stream of activity. The dismal, decaying surroundings were alive with the surge of passengers pushing their way on and off trains filled to bursting. I spotted numerous children in the midst of it all, selling their services as porters for a few coins. As soon as a train pulled into the station, kids would rush aboard. They would hurry off again before the train left, and if they were lucky, they would be carrying someone’s bags for them.
Later that morning we visited the docks on the river. Amid the bustle of the waterfront we found children loading and off-loading cargo. We found them also actively employed in the fishing trade—mending nets, cleaning fish and scraping the debris from the hulls of boats.
There we discovered one of the informal schools that had been set up throughout the city by a Swiss-based organization. It was an impressive operation. Rather than try to get kids to come to one central location, this group was taking school directly to the children, at their workplaces. The working children were given time from their jobs to join the teacher for a few hours each day to learn to read and write and to do basic math.
The children sat on mats under a tree or in a vacant shed, in groups of three or four, each group sharing a small textbook. The teacher, using a chalkboard set on an easel, conducted the lessons, then put questions to the children. The children shot back with their answers. It was simple and efficient, and, to judge by the eagerness of the children, it seemed to be working.
I particularly remember the face of one boy, and the deep gashes on his arms and legs. He had come to sit on the mat not for schooling, but for medical attention.
I sat down next to him. “How were you hurt?” I asked through an interpreter.
“I was pushing a cart up a hill,” he said. “It rolled backwards. The wheel ran over me.”
The wound just above his ankle was jagged, and dirt had started to collect in it.
The teacher had brought some disinfectant and bandages. “I do the best I can for him,” he said. “Much of my time is spent tending to the children’s cuts and wounds.”
“Shouldn’t he go to a hospital?” I asked.
“They would only turn him away. He has no money.”
The boy was in a great deal of pain. He tried to smile, but in his dark eyes was the deeper pain of someone who had known misery through much of his life.
“I hope it will heal soon, and you’re feeling better,” I said to him.
I knew my attempt at comforting him could be no more than a fleeting moment in a life marked by neglect and abuse.
During my four days in Bangladesh, I encountered many different attitudes toward child labour. Some of these were very disturbing, especially when it came to girls working as child domestics.
One woman who was working with an organization for children told me outright, “We see no problem with young girls working as domestics. Girls do not go to school, and this is a way for them to earn their keep.”
She had to be aware, of course, that almost three-quarters of all females in Bangladesh are illiterate, that only thirteen per cent of girls ever enrol in secondary school. Why was she not promoting education for girls, rather than trying to rationalize the present situation? If she had daughters of her own, would she be content to have them work as domestic servants?
These people were of the opinion that child domestic servitude was a tradition in Bangladeshi society that wasn’t inherently wrong, that it just needed to be regulated to prevent abuse. They didn’t feel it exploited children, because, in their opinion, unlike work in shops or industries, “the employer does not get any direct financial benefit from the child labour.”
I think a poster on her office wall said it all. It showed a child domestic worker, and the caption read: “I am not a slave. This is my job.”
In a study of child domestic work in Dhaka, it was found that “the majority of child domestics receive salaries less than 100 taka per month.” That’s less than $1.50 US. Is that not cheap labour?
On one occasion, we had arranged to pick up one of the coordinators of an education video project developed to expose the discrimination against girls in South Asia. The video was titled Meena, referring to the central cartoon character, a highly spirited young girl. Our car came to a stop in front of the gates outside the coordinator’s home. As we sat waiting for her to arrive, we looked past the partly open metal gates. We saw a child, a young girl, squatting on her legs and brushing the leaves and dust off the driveway. Alam, the driver and I stepped out of the car and walked toward the girl.
When she looked up, we saw that she could be no more than ten years old. Her black hair was tied back and her face was marked with dirt. She was indeed one of the thousands of child domestic servants we had heard about.
The woman we were waiting for appeared. On seeing us with the girl, she immediately became very agitated.
“Is she not going to school?” we asked.
“I know nothing about this girl. She has been hired by the landlord.”
The purpose of the film we later watched was to help girls realize they are capable of more than serving others, that they have a right to an education and a right to fulfil their own dreams. Throughout the screening, my mind couldn’t help returning back to the young girl behind the metal gates. I was left to wonder what was stopping the coordinator from making the connection between the girl in the film and the one at her home.
This episode was just one of several in Bangladesh that took me by surprise. Most of my correspondence with human rights organizations in South Asia had been with India, where there was a strong movement against child labour. I was not prepared for what I found in Bangladesh—a strong movement that condoned it.
Again and again we were told that the income children earned from employment was essential for their family’s survival. They pointed directly to what happened with the country’s garment industry as an example of where attempts to change the situation had made matters worse for children, not better.
Bangladesh’s garment industry had been the fastest-growing source of foreign money and employment, with fifty-two per cent of its exports going to the American market. More than 50,000 children worked in the industry, often for long hours in cramped conditions, and for wages of no more than a dollar a day.
In August, four months before my visit, a fire had raged through a Bangladeshi garment factory, resulting in nine people being trampled to death while trying to escape. Four of them were under the age of fourteen. Reports concluded that a gate at the exit was locked and escape routes were blocked. Firefighting equipment was absent or inaccessible.
Yet allowing children to work in textile factories was defended as essential. Many were quick to bring up what had happened as a result of the bill introduced by Tom Harkin2 in the US Senate in 1993. The bill would prohibit the importation of goods made by child labour. Although it has never been passed, it caused great concern in Bangladesh’s garment industry. Fearing the loss of their market, industry officials quickly removed all children from their factories. Without access to any other source of income or better schooling, some children ended up in jobs that were far more dangerous than work in the garment factories—breaking bricks, making fireworks, selling goods on the street.
I met with numerous organizations that used this situation as a reason to promote the need for child labour in Bangladesh. “Work in the garment industry is better than anywhere else. What would you have these children do? Let themselves be scarred making fireworks? Allow them to become prostitutes?”
These organizations, composed entirely of adults, appeared to exist for the sole purpose of writing and distributing literature to promote the need for child labour. One such pamphlet, which was distributed around the world, showed a series of pictures of a child breaking bricks, taking money, eating, and smiling, as if to justify child labour.
I was getting a quick education in the world of human rights organizations. Some seemed more interested in giving themselves jobs than in actually helping children. It was another brand of exploitation, a more elaborate and sophisticated kind, but exploitation nevertheless.
I couldn’t understand why anyone would be satisfied to see kids working long hours in any type of dangerous job. Couldn’t there be other options for these children, improved social programs, schooling? I couldn’t help but feel that the ones who attempt to justify child labour are never the ones who are suffering the most. In fact, I didn’t meet a single child in any of the organizations we met. And no one seemed to agree on a solution.
This was particularly evident in one meeting we had. It brought together Alam and me, a representative of UNICEF, and three “experts” in the field of child labour, two of whom were professors. I asked one basic question: What must be done to eliminate child labour in Bangladesh?
“Good primary education must be available to all children,” said one.
“No,” interrupted another. “These children must have vocational training if they are to find jobs.”
The third broke in quickly: “Primary education and vocational training are both useless, my friends, if we don’t have more economic growth and foreign investment.”
The three of them began to argue among themselves. At first they politely debated their colleagues’ opinions, and attempted to elaborate on their own. Gradually the tension grew, however, and the politeness gave way to bickering and amplified into a full-fledged war of words.
Then the most incredible thing happened. The man who had driven us to the meeting, a chauffeur employed by UNICEF, became so frustrated with the academics that he turned away from them and began to explain to us his own ideas on what should be done to end child labour. As the three experts continued to argue, Alam and I listened to the chauffeur with great interest. He knew working children because he lived and worked with them every day.
I caught the eye of the UNICEF representative, and she began to chuckle. It was enough to touch off the same response from Alam. Soon both of them broke out laughing. Even the driver threw his head back and joined in. I placed my hand over my face to cover the smile that was spreading from ear to ear.
The academics finally stopped their arguing and turned to us in bewilderment. I did my best to apologize for the outburst, and the others gained control of themselves, though we were careful not to look at each other. The meeting continued and we took the discussions in a new direction, all of us now listening to the chauffeur.
I did see some good work done on behalf of child workers. Underprivileged Children’s Education Programme (UCEP), for example, had set up a huge skills-training centre. There I encountered young people hard at work learning a wide variety of trades, including carpentry, metal work, sewing and weaving. They had been given a stipend of 325 taka a month to substitute for the money they would have earned as child labourers.
Another group, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), operates over 30,000 primary schools throughout the country with close to a million children taking part. To its great credit, BRAC has made a strong effort to bring young girls into its programs, with the result that at least seventy per cent of the students (ages eight to sixteen) are female.
Still, sometimes the enormity of the problem of child labour overwhelmed me. Was there, in fact, anything that young people in other countries could do that would really make a difference?
It was a question I asked the representative of UNICEF, an impressive man from the Netherlands, who saw clearly the responsibility of all people to help exploited children. “The very best thing you and the other young people in Free The Children can do is spend your time and the money you raise to educate your own people on the importance of international aid. Help them understand what is happening in poor countries. People in rich countries have to learn to share, to learn how to do with less. They have a psychological need to buy, buy, buy. They are consumed with the idea that they need more, more, more.”
I thought about some of my friends at school, of how important it was to have the newest style of basketball shoes, or the sweatshirt with the right logo. And I thought of my bedroom at home. The video games piled high. All the clothes that filled the closet, all the toys stuffed under my bed. Did I really need all those things? Was it fair that I had so much and the kids I had seen in the slums had nothing?
“Do you really think it makes people happy to have so many possessions?” he asked.
I didn’t have an answer for him.
“If anyone looked seriously at the poor nations, they would see how it is absolutely unacceptable for people in a country like Bangladesh to be living the way they are.”
It left me with a lot to think about. I realized that it’s not enough to look at these people and condemn their child labour practices. The truth is—we are part of the problem, too.
1 The Grameen Bank, under the direction of its founder, Muhammad Yunus, has created a banking system to meet the needs of the poor throughout rural Bangladesh. Over 90 per cent of its loans go to women. Yunus has said, “These millions of small people with their millions of small pursuits can add up to create the biggest development wonder.”
2 As a result of the Harkin Bill, a “Memorandum of Understanding” was proposed to Bangladesh’s garment manufacturers by the American ambassador to Bangladesh and other US officials. It included a monitoring program that would prevent child workers from being suddenly dismissed, and would instead allow them to be gradually phased out of the garment industry over a three-year period to September 1, 1997. Adult relatives of the dismissed children would be given preference for their jobs. Education would be made available for the children.
The members of the Bangladesh garment manufacturers voted against the plan. They did not feel it was their responsibility to provide rehabilitation programs for the children.
Consequently, many children were dismissed without alternative opportunities being in place for them. Seeing that many of the children were worse off, the International Labour Organization, UNICEF and the Bangladesh Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BG-MEA) signed an agreement to provide schooling and a stipend for children under fourteen who had lost their jobs in garment factories. Over two hundred schools were opened.
On the positive side, the Harkin Bill helped to raise greater awareness of the issue of child labour. Governments and business leaders in developing countries, concerned about their exports and financial markets, have begun to take action against child labour in all sectors, not only the export market.
The negative effects, however, are on the children themselves. There is the risk of the children ending up in worse situations, unless programs and alternative sources of income are set up for them before they are dismissed from the factories.
