Meanwhile, after our last post about child labour and slavery, we thought it wise to follow up by referring you to some more information about this huge problem (especially in the Asia-Pacific region) by pointing you to a few other video resources, and our Don't Trade Lives campaign website.

As always, you can find more videos like the above at our Video Tab or at our WorldVisionStir YouTube page.

Some tasks, such as beading and embroidery can risk a child’s eyesight, others like working in factories or on farms, run even higher risks, like unsafe machinery and contact with dangerous chemicals.

Child labour damages every child, every hour that they’re working is an hour they’re not at school. It can become a vicious cycle, as they grow up illiterate, former child labourers often struggle to find well-paid jobs, sometimes forcing their own children into the work force.

The UN Convention of Child Rights was written to protect children from being in forced labour, so why are their still 250 million children working? And what is being done about it? Perhaps this can be a topic you can discuss for Blog Action Day, which is now only 2 weeks away. There are a large number of injustices taking place around our planet. This is just one of the many you could discuss.

You can find even more video resources at the World Vision Stir YouTube channel.

Cheers and keep posting!

You may have read a big news entitled “Rat people forced to beg on Pakistan’s streets“. It was a real shocker to read and, tells of the worst, beyond imaginable, child labour industry. There’s a children’s rights issue you may wish to look into which concerns a very extreme and horrifying form of child labour.

In Pakistan, there are many beggars on the streets but the one’s that will strike you the most are the “rat people”. Now, I’m not going to use that term again because it implies these poor people are sub-human, like animals, and if they’re looked upon this way, people will tend not to treat them as human beings. What low-budget government research in Pakistan has shown is that there could be about 10,000 of these poor kids in Pakistan.

They have been labelled with their ugly name because they have distorted features; rodent-like teeth, large pointy ears, long noses, big eyes, sloping heads, and fingers almost twice as long as the average persons. These beggars all have similar features; indicating whatever has happened to them is a similar situation. They have no distinct gender and cannot reproduce. They are sometimes mute and mostly mentally retarded. They are feared by the local people and so are the most “successful” beggars as superstitious passer-bys hastily shove rupees in their hands so that bad luck doesn’t befall them.

Close by, is the child’s keeper, the man that takes all of the money and places the child out to beg in the forty degree heat. The children have no family and no-one knows where they come from. However, now some shocking suspicions have been voiced about who exactly are these unfortunate children. The reporter says: “I realise I was either witnessing a ghoulish aberration of nature, in the shape of an unfortunate child whose entire mental and physical growth had been distorted by some chromosomal trick, or else I was looking into the face of a human nightmare deliberately created somehow by man for his own profit.”

The article implies that the origin of these beggar children is from the shrine of Shah Daula in a town called Gujrat. The people of Gujrat go to the shrine to ask God for children. When their first baby is born, they willingly give their baby up. The babies are taken and manipulated by some sick, twisted, evil, warped doctor of genetics and his cronies. The skull of a newborn baby is soft and underdeveloped. These people strap metal devices onto the skull of the baby that breaks the soft, bone and tampers with the pituitary gland.

The pituitary gland is a very special gland in the base of the skull. It controls hormones and decides the size, shape and sexual development of a child. If damaged, results like we see in the beggar children of Pakistan can occur. The crimes that people commit against children, causing physical distortion so that they can use kids to make money is just inhumane in the extreme. This is worse than pimps exploiting children in prostitution and it’s hard to believe that people would go to such lengths to make money. If people refused to give rupees to the beggars, the criminals will realise their “industry” has just died and will not deform any more children but what happens to the ones already out there? And I know, if I see a child begging on the street, I would find it very difficult to refuse them money.

Of course, ultimately the best thing would be if the people behind this are investigated, charged and punished but, it seems to me, Pakistan is too wrapped up in military affairs and boasting of building an atomic bomb to be looking after its more vulnerable race. It really is disgusting.

Bling warfare

They say diamonds are a girl's best friend, but these sparklers are fuelling plenty of hate in war-torn areas of Africa, where the trade in illicit rough diamonds and gold has funded rebels in decades of devastating conflicts aimed at undermining legitimate governments in places like Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (download pdf here) was set up in 2003 to prevent these 'conflict' – or 'blood' – diamonds filtering through to the mainstream market. 'Conflict-free' diamonds are now widely available, but sadly jewellery production is still an ethical minefield. Check out www.conflictneutral.com for more information on avoiding conflict stones.

Clean Canadian sparklers?

To avoid the bad publicity of African diamonds, there's been a huge rush for stones from Canada – one of the world's biggest producers – which some companies are promoting as a 'clean' alternative. While these mines aren't funding bloody conflicts, many would argue that some of them are damaging the livelihoods of the indigenous communities living in mining areas, and the fragile ecosystems they depend on.

Sweat behind the sparkle

Worldwide, the people - including about a million children - employed on minimal wages to mine and process supposedly legitimate diamonds, gemstones and precious metals often endure some of the worst working conditions imaginable. Toiling in Asian and African countries with little or no union support means health and safety precautions are slender at best. There's a serious risk of work-related death, injury or chronic illness as workers scratch out a living in remote mines extracting precious and semi-precious stones.

Once out of the mines, jewellery is often manufactured in sweatshop conditions. Most of the world's diamonds are cut in India, often by child labourers working 12 to 14-hour shifts to pay off family debts. And in China many migrant workers are crippled by silicosis, or 'dust lung', after cutting semi-precious stones.

A toxic minefield

The jewellery industry's impact on the environment is far from sparkling. Gold-mining can leave a shocking trail of destruction, with the production of a single gold wedding band leaving behind up to 20 tonnes of mine waste. Cyanide and mercury compounds are used to separate gold from its ore. As well as harming workers, they can pollute land and water, often affecting an area long after the local mine has closed. Then there's the 'acid-rock drainage' of acidic water - out of gold and silver mines and into local groundwater. One bar of gold looks much like any other, so it can be near impossible to track the green credentials of specific pieces of jewellery.

What's the alternative?

The British Ethical Jewellery Association is being set up to help jewellers and customers navigate the ethical jewellery minefield. It will set clear and externally audited standards to help customers make ethical choices. Meanwhile, to sparkle with a clear conscience, insist on certified non-conflict diamonds, look out for recycled metals, and try out some of the alternative materials used by the new breed of ethical jewellers.

Author: Joanna Yarrow is a broadcaster, writer and consultant specialising in green living. She's GMTV's eco expert and presented BBC Three's Outrageous Wasters

Telenor was forced to review and strengthen its ethical guidelines after Norwegian media last May revealed deplorable conditions for workers, including children as young as 13, who supply antenna towers to GrameenPhone, one of the Norwegian company's subsidiaries in Bangladesh.

"They promised that now it's cleaned up ... So you had hoped that after this lesson they would be very careful ... to make sure that it doesn't happen again, but it happened again," Yunus told the news station TV2 Nyhetskanal.

"They are not showing the kind of efficiency you'd be expecting from a company like Telenor," he added.

Telenor owns 62 percent of GrameenPhone, while Yunus' Grameen Bank, with whom he shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for creating a micro-credit system for people too poor to qualify for bank loans, holds a 38-percent stake through a subsidiary.

The Bangladeshi economist has long had a stormy relationship with Telenor, accusing it of breaching a deal concerning control of GrameenPhone.

He said Thursday he had received a call recently informing him of another child labour case involving a GrameenPhone supplier.

Telenor spokesman Paal Kvalheim confirmed that such a case existed involving a small company called Gazi Engineering, but stressed that the firm was "a supplier of a supplier."

"We have 700 suppliers in Bangladesh and we have concentrated on the ones with whom we have a direct relationship. But it is a known fact that child labour is widespread in this country," he told AFP.

He also pointed out that it was Telenor itself that had alerted Yunus to the new case.

Company executive Hilde Tonne meanwhile issued a statement insisting that "when we or others reveal unacceptable conditions further down the value chain, we will of course respond. We are now on to the case."

"Neither Grameenphone nor Telenor can, however, take responsibility for all social wrongdoings in Bangladesh, but we have taken our share of the responsibility to improve conditions with our suppliers and to work for long-term improvements in all the communities where we operate," she added.

According to Telenor, more than 160 Bangladeshi suppliers have so far been subjected to audits and been provided good practice courses.

August 20. 2008

Gethin Chamberlain

The pregnancy came all too easily. Monica was 13, and the man in question was her overseer at the brick kiln where she worked about 40km north of the booming Indian mega-city of Kolkata. More than twice her age and married with two children of his own, he was the son of the kiln owner. He had smiled at her as she trotted past him every day, carrying on her head the rough clay bricks shaped from river mud which she would deposit in the kiln to be baked into the building blocks of Kolkata’s expansion.

For each load of eight bricks she carried, he handed her a small plastic token. At the end of the week, the tokens would be tallied up, and Monica and the other girls feeding the furnace would be allocated a few rupees each. For every 1,000 bricks they carried, most girls received 60 rupees (Dh5).

But not Monica. Sometimes when she held out her hand for a token, the overseer, or munshi as they are known, would press more than one plastic disc into her palm. She would smile and say nothing; it made her happy, though she knew there would be a price to pay.

An overseer sifts through tokens handed out to show how many bricks the children have delivered. Gethin Chamberlain for The National

Later, in the evening, the munshi would seek her out in one of the ramshackle longhouses that the workers called home.

“In the evenings there is nothing to do,” she says quietly. “We were given alcohol [a local spirit made from sugar cane]. I drank some of the alcohol and then he wanted to be involved with me...” She looks down shyly.

There was no question of keeping the baby. An abortion was quietly arranged. There were 15 such terminations among the girls working at her kiln last year alone. A report for the Irish aid agency Goal says the kilns are “akin to a modern form of slavery” where “sexual exploitation, particularly of adolescent girls, is common and is frequently a precondition for the allocation of work”.

Had she received the money she was due, Monica might have considered it a price worth paying. Yet it turned out to have been for nothing, for she and most of the other girls have had little education, and counting the tokens they received was beyond them.

In an environment where knowledge is power and power is something to be abused, they relied on their masters to tell them what they were owed. At the end of the nine months she spent at the kiln last year, she had just 900 rupees (Dh77) to show for her efforts. The owner said she had used up the rest on food and accommodation.

Kolkata is in the grip of a building boom as the mega-city expands dramatically – a boom driven in part by an influx of international capital. Major companies are pouring into Kolkata. Coca-Cola has a bottling plant there; IBM and General Electric are also in place. The information technology giant Infosys is planning a 36 hectare campus employing more than 20,000 people and the bank HSBC has invested in two electronic data processing operations in the city.

ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel company, wants to build a state-of-the-art research and development base, while Siemens is planning a major expansion. In July, BP sealed a $1 billion (Dh3.67 billion) deal with Spice Energy, which secured funding from Dubai Investment Group, to dismantle a German refinery and rebuild it outside Kolkata to handle lower quality crude oil.

The Indian government has also been courting Arab investment for the mega-city programme. Earlier this year, CEOs from 100 companies from 13 Arab countries took part in a conference to discuss multibillion dollar investment in real estate and infrastructure projects in a number of cities, including Kolkata.

There is no evidence to suggest that any of these companies are aware of the practice.

The result is a construction industry desperate for bricks and a brick industry desperate to make as much money as possible from the boom. Owners have turned to child labour to deliver maximum production for minimal cost. About 1.5 million people work in the brick industry in the region; a third of those are children aged 12 to 18 who have travelled there alone.

Children as young as six mould the clay dredged from the river beds and banks; girls as young as 10 work from 6.00am carrying them into the kilns. The girls migrate annually from their villages to the kilns, some with their parents, some alone, and stay there for about nine months.

Many miss out on any form of education; half are illiterate. Alarmed by that, and by the routine sexual exploitation – in one study, one third of girls and 12 per cent of boys reported that they had been abused – and by the lack of educational opportunities, aid agencies have moved in.

But instead of tackling the owners head on, they are trying a different tack; persuading the bosses to give the children time off between shifts to go to school.

The children still have to work, but the education they receive is at least making their lives easier. Basic numeracy means that at the end of the week, when the munshis come to pay them, they now know how many bricks they have carried and how much they are owed.

There is a problem with this. Though about 600 children aged between six and 14 work in the 15 kilns involved in the project, most mixing mud for the bricks for less than eight rupees (73 fils) for every 10,000 bricks they make, the employment of children below the age of 14 is banned in India. If the authorities were to apply the letter of the law, the kilns would be shut down.

Aware that it is operating on the very edge of legality, Goal it argues that working with the owners is the only way to make a difference. There is little political will to translate the law into action, it concludes.

“Brick kiln owners are, first and foremost, business people. Their motivation is profit. Child labour in the current brick production scenario provides the owners with both optimal production and minimal cost opportunities. Appealing to [their] better nature will yield few results,” says Goal’s report.

Better, the aid workers argue, to work with the owners and try to convince them that it makes good business sense to adopt modern technology, reducing the need for child labour.

In the meantime, if they can lean on the owners and persuade them to let the children have some form of education, they argue, then at least they are giving them a chance of a future and the tools with which to fight for what is rightfully theirs.

********************

The countryside of West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas region, where the bricks are made, is dotted with large prawn farming lakes. The chimneys of the kilns poke up, thin and black, into an overcast sky. Only one, Asha Brick Manufacturing, has smoke coming from it; the fires in the rest are out, the monsoon having put an end to brick making for a couple of months.

At the Asha kiln, the employees are racing to get the last bricks into the kiln before they are ruined by the rain. The school is a white painted brick building in the shadow of the kiln, a rough concrete floor covered by a rug. There are posters of animals on the walls; a polar bear, a whale, an elephant and a crocodile. The teachers are provided by a partner agency working with Goal, the Narayatntala Mass Communication Society. They are trained as teachers, paid for by the charity and originate from the area.

********************

It is 2.00pm and the older children have gone back to work. Outside, nine-year-old Sunu stands on a pile of brick shards with his sister Raji, four months old, on his back. He wakes at 7.00am and plays with his four brothers and sisters and takes care of them while their mother carries bricks to the furnace. He takes the baby to her when she cries.

Sunu watches as, from around the corner of a low building next to a large pool, girls emerge carrying the grey moulded clay bricks on their heads. The older women carry 10, the younger ones eight. They balance them on a pad on their heads, moving quickly and smoothly, along the brick dust path that runs alongside the edge of the oval hollow at the centre of which stands the tall, blackened, chimney belching black smoke out over the surrounding countryside.

They walk in through a gap in the brick walls, deposit the bricks in a stack with carefully located gaps to ensure the correct circulation of air, and sashay back out to collect a token from the deaf and dumb munshi who sits watching them go by.

The girls walk quickly, just short of breaking into a run. Those who the munshi favours get a smile and beam back. One girl palms two tokens and trots off. She can be no more than 10 years old.

The kiln is lit in December and the fire slowly moves round. Those bricks that have been baked are allowed to cool then removed, new ones constantly added. At the height of the production, they can bake 20,000 bricks a day.

At the entrance to the track that leads to the kiln, a group of women and very young children are squatting by the roadside. There are two tiny babies. The women worked until last week and now they wait listlessly for their money. They travelled to the kiln nine months ago from the state of Jharkhand, on West Bengal’s western border, to join the 300 others working at the kiln. Their villages are based on agriculture, but there is never enough work. The children sit in the brick dust by the roadside. Every now and again, a lorry thunders past, kicking up a few stones, before silence descends again.

********************

Pelong thinks she is 32, though she is not sure. She looks much older. She holds on to Seeta, 13 months old, one of her three surviving children. Four others died.

“From childhood I have been earning money for my family,” she says. “I have never been to school. We are from a small village. My family were farm workers and had a small piece of land. I got married at 13, then we started migrating for work. I have been working in the brick kilns for 10 years, nine months here every year. It is hard work.”

They should earn about 9,000 rupees for nine months work, six days a week; men earn an average of 70 rupees a day (Dh5.9), women 40 rupees (Dh3.4). But Pelong has no idea how much she should be due; it depends on how many bricks she carried and she cannot count. The labour contractor loaned her 520 rupees to get there and now he says the interest on it means she is not owed any money at the end of her nine month stint. “But I do get free wood for the cooking,” she adds.

Dulary, about 35, has two children, Chato, a boy of seven and Puja, a girl of 14. She lives with the others near the kiln, in the longhouses separated by mud, with washing strung between the buildings and firewood piled on the roofs. Puja disappeared about a month ago. Dulary thinks she met a boy and is now married. She has no way of finding out. The aid workers think she has been trafficked.

Outside the office, the owner, SK Din Mohammed, 54, leans against the wall. He is well dressed in a clean white shirt, with a neat greying beard and thinning dark hair. He has owned the business for 10 years and is a member of the local administration.

He breaks off to tell the others, who have gathered to watch, to get on with their work. The rains are coming and already 600,000 bricks have been wasted. They lie, damp and useless, piled up around the kiln.

He gets 4.5 rupees per brick for the best quality, 4 for the next and 3.5 for the rest. He sells about four million bricks every year.

“The people enjoy working for me,” he says. “The children come from a poor state. No one educates them there but at least here they have an opportunity to learn.”

There are no children working under the age of 14, he says. “The children you see are helping their families. They are not working.”

********************

The aid agency hopes its efforts will bring literacy levels up to 80 per cent by 2010. But Bhuwan Ribhu, lawyer for The Global March Against Child Labour, says they are deluding themselves.

“I think it is nonsense,” he said. “They are promoting these crimes by not raising their voices against them. They should be going after the overseers. If a child is not getting the minimum wage, if the girls are being exploited, they are working as slaves. The government should be forced to open schools and the kilns should be shut down.”

At the entrance to the kiln, Monica skips barefoot through the gap in the stack of bricks, stretches out her pale palm to grab the blue token from the hand of the munshi. Their eyes meet for a moment and she giggles before disappearing off down the path. Nothing is said; nothing needs to be said. Later on, they might meet up. The nights are long. And tomorrow her pile of counters will grow a little higher than those of the other girls. Monica will hope that the price this year is not too high to pay.

By: Emily Meredith

This article originally appeared as a package in the Hindustan Times on August 18, 2008.

India's magazine houses rely on a decentralised system of distributors, contractors and retailers to market their titles, permitting them to deny directly hiring children while benefiting from their employment.

Davinder Rawat sells periodicals from his shop in INA market, but much of his business comes from the special street promotions he runs for publishers.

Rawat said publishers approach him to get a title out, and he in turn hires contractors for street sales. He said the people he hires are all old enough to work but acknowledged they may hire juveniles without his knowledge.

"Even if the contractor is hiring [youths], I am only employing one person," he said. Publishers and distributors also deny direct involvement with children.

"We are not selling it to the children," said Pawan Kumar Das, at India Book House's Delhi centre.

Abhimanu Ghosh, CEO of Planman Media, which publishes The Sunday Indian and 4P, admitted seeing children sell his publications, but said the system of sales and marketing prevents Planman from knowing exactly who is hired to sell its titles.

"We are very disturbed ourselves, not just that it's a social issue, but it's also a public disaster to us," said Ghosh. "It pains us because we are a very responsible media company."

Publishers use two distribution channels, depending on their goals, according to Vinay Maheshwari, HT's own circulation manager.

If a magazine wants to increase sales, it uses a distributor. The distributor sends it to bookstores and newsstands. It might contact an agent like Rawat's. The publisher pays commission on each copy sold.

If the goal is visibility, the company contacts Dawat directly and pays an outright fee. In return, Dawat ensures that India's upwardly mobile commuters see its magazines at red lights.

Maheshwari said HT has used a distributor for sales of the annual dining guide but does not hire agents directly.

Most high-profile titles, including foreign ones, in India are published by a handful of companies, including Planman, Outlook and Media Transasia India.

Outlook India, which holds licenses for several foreign titles like People and Marie Claire, cannot control the final vendor either, according to its publisher Maheshwar Peri. Representatives from Tehelka and Media Transasia India, which published the Indian edition of Maxim, did not return requests for comment.

Peri said Outlook bars its printers and other contract companies from using child labour, but doing the same for sales is difficult.

"What we employ are contractors," Peri said. "The contractors in turn employ sales people, who are adults. What happens after that is not in our control."

Anyway, they said they'd stay and stuff newsletters for a while ...

For anyone who'd like to read the newsletter but isn't on our mailing list, it's HERE. The most recent can be read via the link at the top of the page, and the back issues are listed towards the bottom. Some of them are very LONG ... I tend to waffle a bit. Sorry (just not very).

Stop at a traffic signal and a child approaches you to buy a plastic replica of the Indian tri-color. You buy it in the spirit of celebrating the liberation of your country. Do you notice this child’s ragged clothes or his withered hands? Do you notice how sad it is that this child, who should be studying and enjoying a childhood has a mighty sales target at the tender age of 9?

Moving on… We make plans for the day. Meeting friends, sleeping at home, watch a movie and a lot more. It is nothing but a holiday for a majority of people. They see the parade on the road or catch a few TV shows (which are oozing of patriotism only to raise their TRPs…)

School kids attend the mandatory flag hoisting ceremony at school, run back home to study for the upcoming mid-term exams. ‘It’s so unfair… We are independent now, so what’s the big deal. I’d rather sit at home and finish the history chapters,’ says a student who’s swamped with homework. I want to tell her to jump to Chapter 11 in her history textbook that describes the moment, the midnight hour when Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru welcomed freedom into a nation that had been ruled by the British Empire for a century and a half.

But no, she shouldn’t jump to it. She should read through the text and understand how many lives were laid down to get to that moment. She should know about the magnificent lives who strived hard to give us this Independence that is ‘no big deal’ for her.

‘So the Brits were pretty damn mean haan?’ her young mind asks.

My mind says yes and no. I truly believe that it is the British rule that instated the feeling of patriotism amongst us. Before they arrived, we were a bunch of states ruled by Kings, who fought amongst themselves.

The Brits, united these territories, for ease of administration for them, but thus bringing us under one roof. They brought with them modern western education that taught us to rationalise beyond religion. This education created a class of Indians who went on to fight against age-old customs. If it wasn’t for the Brits, individuals like Raja Ram Mohun Roy or Maharshi Karve would have found it hard to fight the staunch beliefs of an orthodox society.

As an Indian woman, I feel grateful to the Brits and people like Roy, Karve and Phule. They fought together to introduce education for women. They helped us come out of the kitchen and see the world. They fought hard to abolish the Sati ritual. Can you imagine jumping into your husband’s pyre, because without a husband your life is invalid? You can’t! So say a small thank you to these guys today.

As a citizen of this country, which is developing at a fast rate, one thinks of JRD Tata who pioneered industrialization in this country. The technology and the know-how came to India, thanks to the Industrial revolution in England.

Our public transport system, our impeccable postal service, the governance, education, has been set up by the British rulers of that time. The systems they installed were good enough to withstand corruption and million other hiccups that an independent country suffers from.

As a journalist, I feel grateful to Mr. Benjamin Horniman. His name has been eternalised in Mumbai with a magnificent garden opposite the Asiatic library. Have a hard look and you will know why this gentleman was important. As a pro-freedom editor of the Bombay Chronicle, he promoted the feeling of nationalism. With his coverage of Jallianwallah Bagh massacre and his propaganda to plan Satyagrahas against the Imperial rule, this man made a monumental contribution in creating the strongest platform to unite all Indians in thought and opinion.

Take some time and try to imagine what life was like before 15^th August 1947. And then think of the day today. It’s not just a mere holiday, it’s a day for us to value our freedom. It is a day to remember our rights and more importantly remember our responsibilities as the citizens of a free India. While doing so don’t look at the British era with hatred. They are a huge part of the reason why we are what we are today. What we will be tomorrow will be defined by our thoughts and actions.

Jai Hind…

“It’s a good thing to grow up in the warm embrace of your family. I really want to go home.”
“I will love you forever, Mum and Dad.”

“This place is death.”

(A child's graffiti, near a polypropelene factory in China)

There are two tables crammed into the tiny workshop, along with two electric fans and a VCD player. The children start work at eight in the evening, and when there is a lot of work, the shift may be extended. After midnight, when the children get verysleepy, they turn on the music, and everyone nods their heads while singing along.... While sewing on the beads, the children’s hands are stuck by the needle dozens of times each day and their hands are full of calluses. Because their eyes cannot leave the needle and the bead, the children have all developed “panda eyes” – they cannot open their eyes wide, and are always complaining that their eyes hurt. There is a small first-aid kit in the factory, full of the painkiller analgin. After long periods of night work, many of the children suffer headaches, to the point that they cannot work. 13-old Liu Yiyi takes analgin two or three times each evening.

The quote above and the description of the working conditions of children in China are taken from:

Small Hands: A Survey Report on Child Labour in China
China Labour Bulletin
(http://www.clb.org.hk)
September 2007

: : : : : : : : : :

As I type this, it's printing. Now all we need to do is send it out, and it's at this juncture that I should, perhaps, point out the foolishness of printing 3,000 copies of a newsletter in August because in August, the world and his wife are on holiday. (I know this, of course, because a sizeable proportion of them are trying to End It All on the corner at the bottom of the drive ... QV.) I am not on holiday, you'll have noticed, but everyone else is ... So what's the answer?

CHILD LABOUR!

I'm honestly surprised that Gretchen's grandchildren come anywhere near this place. Ever since Adam and Isaac arrived here they've been doing virtually nothing but sticking labels on envelopes, sticking stamps on envelopes and shoving newsletters in envelopes. What's more their shameless and neglectful parents left them here in full knowledge that it would happen.

I always knew children had to be good for something.

Royal Verkade, a Dutch household name and subsidiary of United Biscuits, announced that they will be using 100% Fair Trade cocoa and sugar in their products from the autumn onwards. This is the first A-list chocolate producer worldwide to make the transition to Fair Trade production on a large scale. Well done Royal Verkade for taking this decision.

Verkade have previously been linked with the worst forms of child labour in Ivory Coast.

Verkade make Kinder Eggs

(Adapted from the BBC-Man with 86 wives).

I find this piece of news very disturbing. One man (Mohammed Bello Abubakar) who is married to 86 wives!

Nigeria is over populated with possibly a population of over 150m people. Family planning is a serious issue as several people continue to have children that they cannot cater for.

Child labour is also a serious problem in Nigeria as many children skip school to earn a living for themselves and ridiculously for their families.

The attitude of this man is ridiculous. It is another example of religion gone mad.

This man cannot support his extremely large family and his children are begging for money before they can eat.

Pure wickedness if you ask me.

This man should be investigated and possibly prosecuted for crimes against humanity. At 84, he should be told to hang his dick. Enough!

Dear Child Labourer:

I really wish my sons could swap places with you for a day. 

Just one day.

Maybe even one hour would be enough.

Just so they would be eternally grateful for what they have.  You see, for the tenth time this morning I had to hear them cry, "I'm bored" followed by "there's nothing to do."  After only about twenty minutes of swimming in their own pool, they told me they were getting out because they were bored.  Bored of swimming?  Huh?

While I love my children very much, I sometimes wonder whether I have been too excessive with them in the gifts department and because of this they really have no idea how good they actually have it.  They complain about their chore lists and when they have to do homework, there can be serious meltdowns.  If something with a screen has a slight malfunction, they have severe withdrawls from it.  And, calling them down to dinner can turn in to a yelling fest as if I am calling them from across the other side of the world.

All this has caused me to think about children who are less fortunate than my own.  Children who would love nothing more than to simply go to school.  Children who would love to have homework and simple household chores to complain about.  Children who could probably swim all day and never complain about being bored. 

And, so I decided to google these children and discovered you.  Taken from your mother's side at such a young age and forced to work.  According to the International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), there are 218 million child labourers in the world between the ages of 5 and 17 years of age.  In other words, 1 in 7 children around the world is a child labourer risking injury, death and missing out on education.

And, my children have the audacity to complain about being "bored" or "dreading their first day back at school."  I am sorry for what you endure every day.  I can't imagine what it must be like to not be able to play and socialize with friends.  If more people like myself reduced our demand for cheaply produced products or diamonds then the elimination of child labour is within reach.

Children belong in school, not in work and I think it's time I teach my boys a lesson about just that.  I know they don't mean to sound so ungrateful because they truly are amazing children and I am very proud of them, but they need a lesson in humility.  One that hopefully will make them think twice before they ever utter those two words, "I'm bored" again.

Sincerely,

Momma of some wonderful, loving albeit spoiled children

I see underemployed people collecting plastic on the streets everyday. They even come by door in the mornings. They sell that plastic to bigger collectors that then truck them into plastic yards.

The yards buy the plastic at around P22/kg ($0.50 approx). At the yards people then sort plastic according

to grade, peel off the labels, clean then grind it. Whole families work at these yards. Even children are employed. Salaried employees make between P200 to P500 a day (approx. $5 - $11), the plastic peelers (many of them children) make are paid by the kilo and make much less. The cleaned and ground plastic is then resold to corporations to be recycled into new plastic items for about P55/kg.

To the right you see a man sifting plastic bits out of the cleaning vat.

Here kids sort out the plastic bottle caps by grade (indicated by colour: clear, then white, and up to black). Some of these kids no longer go to school and work to help their family fight off extreme poverty. The two above are still in school. At the time of the photo it was mid-semester break.

The question of child labour becomes a much more difficult one in the Philippines when the choice is not just to go to work or school, but to eat or not. Even if an urban poor child were to go to school the statisitics are depressingly low for them to find meaningful work after graduation.

Many families have decided to set up makeshift homes in the plastic yard to save money on rent and transportation. This family home of wood and corregated iron has no electricity and houses a family from the provinces. They moved here a year ago to look for work. These kids are still in school and don't work in the yard.