Looking them in the eye

I'm sitting on my mattress writing an essay about child laborers. Three feet in front of me, an actual child laborer is coloring pictures on a piece of paper, likely her best intellectual stimulation in days. To my left, her little brother is hammering away at Rose's purse, fixing a strap that's been broken for months. He fixed the zipper on my laptop cover before that. In both instances we didn't ask him to do it, but he's in our room a lot and just noticed things that needed fixing.

We're taking advantage of the job skills of a 9-year-old child laborer.  He and his sister work at home making purses instead of going to school.  Is it a bad thing that we let him fix our things today, getting an advantage from skills that he learned in place of learning to read?  Or is it a good thing because we're giving him a chance to feel important and serve us in some way, making our relationship more even? Should we pay him for what he's doing? Or is it better to keep a give-and-take as part of our friendship, where we share our food and buy him notebooks and pencils to draw and color with, and he fixes our zippers and purse straps?

These are the questions we ask ourselves. I can buy breakfast from 13 and 14-year-old sisters who roll out pooris. Dinner could come from a 15-year-old who has been working all day to prepare fish for her mom's restaurant. I pass doors where young boys who should be in elementary school are weaving rugs and melting on shoe soles. Nearly every corner store will be manned by a preteen for at least part of the day. The garbage on the streets will be picked up by kids as young as three, to later be sorted for recyclables by kids of every age. And professional beggers start almost from birth, as infants are loaned to begging women to elicit sympathy until the kids are old enough to walk around and pull on shirts with pleading eyes.

Figuring out appropriate responses to child labor are some of the “big” questions we find ourselves dealing with here. Whether to give to a begging child, whether to buy clothes in part made by a 12-year-old, and what to say to parents who are barely surviving even with the help of their working children are difficult scenarios to work out answers to. But I'm glad that we can be asking those questions in a context where those who face the consequences of our choices are right in front of us. In much of the rest of the world, millions of people every day are buying cell phones assembled in Chinese factories, eating chocolates or coffee made with cocoa and coffee beans from African farms, buying clothes and toys produced in Southeast Asian sweatshops (made from cotton grown in central Asia), eating beef, sugar, and tobacco made on South American plantations, wearing jewelry with gold and diamonds from African mines, and in general taking advantage of cheap child labor across the world, without ever meeting one of the kids who helped get that product to them at such a cheap price.

Visiting the neighbors

Our neighbor Pappu to his wife: “Sometimes Jon gets 10 rupees of subsee/poori for breakfast!”

Wife, appearing shocked, “10 rupees for breakfast! Really?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I guess the food is cheap here for them?”

Rose, “Yeah.”

10 rupees is the equivalent of 18 cents. 10 rupees of subsee/poori buys 4 pooris, each made with a piece of dough the size of a plum, and about 10 ounces of delicious potatoes and chickpeas. While the subsee/poori man does good business in 5 rupee and 10 rupee increments, most people in our neighborhood are limited to tea and dry biscuits for breakfast. A typical budget for some families in the slum is only 100 rupees a day. Our current budget works out to around 400 rupees a day, not counting trips outside the city, language school, or and health insurance, and there are only 2 of us!