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.
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.
5 comments:
Imagine a scholarship program that pays a small stipend to families if their kids are in school (and performing). This idea seems so obvious, I think something like it must already exist. Does it? Do you think that is a good idea or bad idea?
It indeed does already exist in India, in the form of a government program for girls (not boys) who are in school, to encourage the education of girls. I do think it's a good idea, though I haven't spent any time reading through any counterarguments. But, like all government programs in India, it is poorly advertised and in some ways poorly administrated, and the vast majority of the poor do not access it.
On a smaller scale, the team I used to be with in Thailand is doing the same thing on a very small scale for kids who were previously begging in the streets. And I think it could possibly be a good thing in our basti. The big problem is that it is almost impossible to scale up unless you have government backing, and we're hoping to find solutions that could be copied by other communities who don't necessarily have rich westerners with lots of rich western friends.
Why is it impossible to scale up without government backing? Because government has more money or because government has more administrators?
Money, infrastructure, and stability. Someone like me could administer the program in our neighborhood, if there was a good amount of private financial backing. But you'd need someone like me in every new neighborhood you tried to reach. Even gigantic NGO's like World Vision are only working in a small % of India's communities, so you'd have to create a new infrastructure every step of the way. And only a few structures can guarantee the kind of 10-15 year financial stability that would be required to see even the first generation through school.
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