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The law
says it shouldn't be happening. The law says that
children shouldn't be employed until they reach the age
of 14. The statistics only highlight what any visitor to
Bangladesh can't fail to notice. Kids dressed in rags by
the side of busy roads breaking bricks, often alongside
women, occasionally elderly. It is no exaggeration to
see a naked child hanging off a mother's shoulders while
she using tiny hammers to break bricks down to a
shingle. Slowly the large pile of bricks on one side
will morph into an ochre dust and another pile will be
delivered. These wretched creatures live, eat, work and
sleep by their work station, all but oblivious to the
Pajaroes that cruise past and the wealth they symbolise.
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UNICEF statistics from 1995 showed 46 % of boys
and 36 % of girls between the ages of 10
and 14 worked in one form or other. These stats
do not show the countless young waifs packed off
to the Middle East to work as jockeys, domestics
or worse, they slip under the horizon.
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Useful links in
compiling this article:
Child Workers in Asia
Among The Expats -
an unprinted tale
of living and working in Bangladesh
From UNICEF
Hard to Reach |
While kids
grow up in the west and in middle class Asia taking
things for granted like refrigerators, computers and
cars, there is a whole strata of society who are all but
neglected. And if certain goody goody organizations in
the west had their way, this way of earning a pittance
will be taken from them and then the horrors will
multiply for the kids concerned. As it is they are taken
out of school and put to work and the reasoning is
Economics 101. School costs money, a child studying
brings nothing to the dinner table. On the other hand,
with a father riding a rickshaw and a mother also
breaking bricks, children are contributing economically
to the family unit. Forget the education, forget the
risks to health, better the reality of rice today than
the dream of fish tomorrow.
I spent a
few years living in Dhaka and the brick breakers were as
much a part of the urban landscape as rickshaws and
double decker buses. So common they became every day
sights and as such blended into the surroundings, they
were the surroundings, they lost their power to shock.
And I ignored them. There was a small community of them
near my home in Banani, I drove past them everyday on
the way to the club or the golf course. Oh yes I had it
tough. And as I drove past them, sorry as I was driven
past them, I, like so many others, kept looking straight
ahead. I didn't want to acknowledge them, I felt they
weren't any of my business. In the bar a few newbie
bleeding hearts would say 'oh isn't it a shame, those
poor people', they would assuage their guilt while
buying a round of drinks that could have fed a family of
6 for a week. Old hands would poo poo their naivety
while grabbing for the ice cold beer. Who was right? Of
course it's bad but what can we as individuals do? The
problem is too big so I didn't try.
It's glib
to say end all child labour. But that it could be done,
oh it were so easy. The paisals and takas
these children earn, not just by the side of the road
but in riding rickshaws, working as domestics, slaving
in sweat shops can mean the difference between eating
badly and eating. Bangladesh's problems are exacerbated
by it's climatic extreme. Heavy monsoons can flood
fertile land, drought can parch it, often for the people
on the land they are caught between the two. In this
hand to mouth existence people migrate to where
the money is perceived to be. Dick Whittington wasn't
the last to hear a city's streets are paved with gold.
Menial day labouring jobs in the city bring an income
that, however erratic, exceeds toiling under the
vengeful eye of Mother Nature.
The
numbers multiply in the Bengali months of Aswin and
Kartik
after the
planting season when the millions who work the land find
their work is done. They flock to the cities with their
families and break bricks, anything to get that rice in
their mouths. In the towns and cities they fall prey to
petty thugs, mastan, who extort their tithe from
anything that doesn't move. Even on the mean streets the
kids and their women folk are at the mercy of the
capricious. Show these people Oliver Twist and they'd
say it was a pile of crap. No one in their world is the
size of the Beadle and no one they know has a roof over
their heads. A canvas sheeting perhaps. Abuse is rife,
sexual and physical, from family members and the
authorities, it's little wonder 'respectable' Bangladesh
crosses the path to avoid these urchins...
It's
difficult to describe their lives without coming across
as patronising or over the top. This is written based
upon personal observations (when I wasn't looking
straight ahead) and by talking with people. We like to think
children are the future but that's bollocks. At least
for these children. It is difficult to see what future
they might have. On a micro level there are programmes
on the ground which are making a difference. Maybe not
in keeping the kids out of work, that's impossible, but
at least trying to give them a basic education, teaching
them to read and write. (See the UNICEF link above.) Grameen Bank offers micro credit to landless women, they
are I guess deemed more trustworthy than the men folk,
who club together and start small cottage businesses
like handicrafts or sewing. It's like using a teaspoon
to drain the Pacific but it's a start.
Another
UNICEF project run with the Bangladesh government is
called Hard To Reach which is fairly self explanatory.
Poor people often live in a twilight world and in the
lunacy that is Bangladesh this gets very murky. The kids
on the streets who should benefit from these projects
are often unaware they even exist. When families can't
read ignorance is a way of life and yet in that Asian
way everyone knows that education is the key. After a
day of brick breaking some children, often encouraged by
illiterate parents, attend these projects for an hour or
so a day where they become ... children. On the streets
they have to become feral to survive, their frailties
hidden under a shell, but in a mud hut with a couple
dozen of their own kind, working kids, impoverished and
underfed, they learn another side to themselves. Small
things like laughter, playing, friendship.
In my
harsher moments I often wonder just what it would be
like to take some smug kid with a silver spoon, give him
a hammer and have him break bricks in the daylight
hours. Not for an hour or two, not for a day or two, but
for a month or two because only by understanding what it
is like to go without can one really appreciate what it
is like to have. Perhaps for once Hollywood even can
take a lead. Instead of regurgitating the same old
movies, adding sequels and prequels, why not move to the
mean streets of Dhaka and highlight the inhuman
conditions some children live in. |
