A day in the life of a 10-year-old child laborer

7am: School starts. Wake up as late as possible to wash your face, throw on your uniform, pack your snack, and get all your books and notebooks together. Doing these tasks inappropriately may lead to getting a beating at school.

1pm: School ends. You were nodding off a lot of the time anyway. Rush home for lunch and a tiny rest.

1:30pm: Arabic and Urdu lessons at the mosque start. Here you gain a religious education and the basics of 2 more languages to add to the Hindi and English you're learning at school.

5pm: Lessons at the mosque end. Go directly to the screen-printing shop, where a stable of young boys keeps the operation going.

7pm: Leave the screen-printing shop for your job assisting the local slum medical dispensary.

11pm: Shift at the dispensary finishes. For the 4 hours a day you give there, you receive 300 rupees (about $5) a month.  $5 a month.  You head right back to the screen-printing shop.

3am: Shift at the screen-printing shop finishes. For the 6 hours a day you give there, you will receive 50 rupees (about $1) a week. This wage holds for your first 3 years, which is your “apprenticeship”. (You actually learned the entire job in the first week.)

At the age of 10, you are earning almost $10/month for your family by working 10 hours a day. That works out to an hourly wage of a little more than 3 cents.

Age 13

After 3 years of this, you will quit school so you can work at the screen-printing shop 13 hours a day. Your apprenticeship ends and your pay as a screen-printer jumps to $1.50/day. Combined with a minor raise at the dispensary, you are now earning about $55 a month for your family. With 17 hours of work per day, that works out to almost 10 cents an hour. Due to the death of your father 3 years earlier, you are the primary breadwinner in your family.

Age 15

After several years, the dispensary pay climbs to $12/month, and the screen-printing shop slowly raises your wages until they reach $2.50 a day. Now you are earning $85/month, or about 17 cents an hour.

Age 16

At this age you are able to find more legitimate work at a local mall that pays $3.50/day for 10+ hours, 6 days a week. You now earn over 30 cents an hour, a wage that won't get you out of the slum but at least seems within the bounds of human decency. However, you will never get the chance to repeat the missed years of school. You will never make up for the childhood play that you lost. You may never recover from the health problems you picked up from sitting/standing/working for 18-20 hours a day during your growing years. And your family won't be any closer to ending the cycle of poverty that forced you into your child labor career in the first place.

This is not the story of every child laborer. Many do much easier work, for fewer hours. Others do much harder work for just as many hours. Not all have to start by age 10. Some start as early as 2 or 3. (As hard as that is to believe, yes, you can pick up trash and you can beg as early as age 2 or 3.) Obviously not everyone loses a father, but a surprisingly large number of people under these conditions lose their father or some other family member at an early age. Some children get paid a little more than this. Many get paid even less. Some are able to continue going to school. Many never go to school at all. And some eventually are able to work their way into even better jobs, where they can reasonably support a family outside the slum without their own kids having to work. But many will be stuck in the very same jobs they did as children for the rest of their lives, as will their own children.

There is nothing in our basti that bothers me as often as the cycle of child labor that I see on a daily basis. Lord, be with those kids. Lord, help me to find some way to address the issue and work together with them towards a more fulfilling life.

The same fever is not the same fever

Three weeks ago I had a fever. I started getting headaches, my skin was achy, I became very tired, and a crazy red rash spread all over my body from head to toe. It might have been a mild case of Dengue Fever, or it could have been any number of other viral infections. A little more than a week after the first symptoms, I was fine.

It wasn't until I got better that I realized how many other people in the slum were sick. My good friend's baby had a fever. So did his aunt. So did my language helper. All five people in the family we ate the feast with were sick. So were four members in another family we knew. So were all sorts of other people in the basti – one here, one there. Rose, gratefully, never got sick, nor did our landlord or their family, but almost everyone else we knew seemed to have at least one family member go down.

It was in the midst of this little epidemic that I realized how different my experience still is from the experience of my neighbors. For me, getting the funny rash/fever was a little bit of an adventure. I enjoyed trying to figure out what I had. I was somewhat uncomfortable, but not horribly so. I had to take it easy for a few days, but I don't have a lot of responsibilities anyway. When I went to endure a 2.5 hour liturgy near the tail end of the illness (at a church we have to walk 2 miles to get to), I made it a little bit of a personal contest to see if I could continue to stand up without passing out. I observed my symptoms closely, and was ready to go to a doctor the moment that anything extraordinary happened, but nothing occurred that forced me to take the fever very seriously.

It is not that way for my neighbors. For them, even the “mild” fever hits their health hard. They don't have the background of good rest and nutrition and exercise and easy living that I have, and so their bodies have far less leeway. They are really wiped out when a virus makes their body work that much harder. The adults get less work done. The kids miss school, some more than a week. Death is a real possibility for babies and young children and the elderly and those whose bodies are already wracked by other thing. In families where multiple members are sick, a lot of the normal life stops.

And these little epidemics are something that happens a lot in the basti.

I am reminded that no matter where I choose to live, or how I choose to live, for me it is a choice. I wasn't forced into this life, and I could leave it whenever I want. And no matter what possessions or connections I give up, I haven't given up my education, my stable and healthy upbringing, my foreign passport, my medical insurance, or my access via friends and family to as much money as I would ever need (no matter how little might be in my own bank account).

I hope, through this life, to know the poor better. I hope to have solidarity with them in some way, to understand their hopes and fears to a deeper degree than I could if I didn't live with them, to be able to form a community together that will benefit both of us.

But I am reminded that as much as I have solidarity with them, I will never be them. And because of that, they keep having to suffer in ways that I don't, even when we share the same fever.

Inviting those who can't pay you back

The tension was clear.

Our friends explained their dire financial situation. Their landlord, who is prejudiced against Muslims, had bumped their already inflated rent another 25% in an effort to get them to leave. They used everything they had to pay her, and now could not afford food. Their teenage daughter (who had just started school for the first time) had to be pulled out of school to help them rush to finish the next batch of the wallets they make. Until the wallets are finished and the father goes on a trip out-of-town to sell them, they will not have money. And to make matters worse, the entire family has been sick with fever.

Why was there tension? Because the family had a desperate financial need, and knew we had money, but didn't want to ask. They had already taken a very small loan (American equivalent $5) from us the previous month. Now they couldn't pay back that loan. They wouldn't ask us for money again under those circumstances. For our part, we don't want to increase their indebtedness to us, and are afraid we might mess up the relationship even more if we start giving them money as gifts. So we didn't offer, and they didn't ask.

These decisions tear us apart on a daily basis.

We couldn't leave it at that. So as a small gesture, we invited them over for lunch the next day. We made a huge feast (by our standards), the biggest we've ever made in our little slum home. Though our cooking left a little to be desired, some of it turned out okay, and we had a nice time together with good conversation. It didn't solve any of their issues, but they got a high-calorie meal at a time when those are few and far between, and we got to have a good time together that strengthened our friendship rather than making it more awkward.

I don't know what the long-term solution is. But for now, I felt that we were able to love them a little bit.

After our friends left, I remembered Luke 14:12-14.

He said also to the man who had invited him, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”

Ironically, we had invited to our feast the very people who could not repay us. And I got an insight into Jesus's wisdom and love. A feast is something people share in together. It is not a soup kitchen or a food distribution. It brings the providers and the beneficiaries together, and as long as the host is gracious, can be a meal among equals even when the participants are not financially equal. It shows the trust and friendship involved in letting another person come into your home. It makes the experience about community, rather than about the provider or the beneficiary. A true feast shared together in a home adds dignity, rather than taking it away.

Jesus tells us that instead of inviting those who are already our friends or our relatives, those who are assumed to be in our own financial circles, we should invite into our homes those who cannot afford to have their own feasts. And from everything else that Jesus does and says, I have to believe this is done with the hope that those people will be added to those we consider our friends and family.