History comes to life at AES
By Carol Feingold/ amesbury@cnc.com
Friday, December 16, 2005
From the Amesbury News, Amesbury, Mass., Dec. 16 -- The issue of child labor, both in the past and in the present, is coming alive for Amesbury Elementary School fourth graders in Nancy Sullivan and Pamela Gagnon's classes, as they take participate in "Everyone is a Leader: The Impact of Children on Child Labor Reform of the 1800s."
The unit is AES's CiviConnections Service Learning Project paid for through a $7,500 grant from the National Council for Social Studies with funding from the federal corporation for Nation and Community Services Learn and Serve America initiative. The theme of the grant is "Connecting the Past, Creating the Future."
Using drama, computers, and local history in the form of a 14-year-old Amesbury boy named George McNeil, AES educational technology teacher Bruce McBrien and AES performing arts teacher Suzanne Morin are making history come alive for the fourth graders. ...
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... We want the children to ask themselves, 'Does child labor still exist today? What do you think should be done about it? Do you have the power to make change? What happens if you don't do anything about it?" Morin said. "I can teach them to be responsible for their social actions. That's a very big component of the arts."
"Ideas we hope students will take away from this project," McBrien said, "include: every child should be free and in school until at least age 14; fight for tougher international laws that protect children through legislation, and ask before you buy if the item is guaranteed child labor free."
Save us, cry guardians of child labor
Pushpa Narayan
Thursday, December 08, 2005 02:12:17 am  TIMES NEWS NETWORK
BANGALORE : It’s not just the children but the guardians of child rights who seem to cry for police protection. The members of the Child Welfare Committee, with special focus on domestic child laborers, are demanding police protection as they have been receiving threats from some employers.
Of the 120-odd domestic child labor cases filed before the Child Welfare Committee in the last two-and-half years, at least 10 per cent of the employers were government employees including those from the city police and department of women and child welfare.
While the cases are still under trial, an inquiry has been initiated against these officials. Some officials have refused to appear before the committee stating ignorance of the code of conduct, that prevents them from employing children below 14 years, and many others have intimidated the committee members with "having the muscle power to move things in the government."
"I don’t want to mention names as the cases are still under trial but I have been receiving several threats from the policemen. We are not judges but we are doing a similar job to protect the rights of children. I am not scared to say that we need police protection and support," Veerendra Sharma, member, Child Welfare Committee, told The Times of India .
Committee chairperson Nina Nayak has also received complaints of harassment. "We function in a very informal way. We hardly look like a court, because we want to make the environment child-friendly. And the adults refuse to behave themselves. Sometimes, they use un-parliamentary words and get defensive," she said.
Even as a dozen cases of child labor by government officials including three policemen and one official from the department of child and women welfare are being tried, what has worried the committee is the result.
Of the 120 cases tried, 74 were solved. But the police has filed FIR for only 9 cases, and of these only 4 have been charge-sheeted.
"Not one person has been arrested. Unless people are arrested how will there be fear to obey the law? We still don’t know if any disciplinary action will be initiated by the departments against the staff if found guilty," a CWC member said.
19,000 children working as sex workers in Lahore: UNICEF
New Kerala, 11 Dec 2005
INDIA - The United Nations International Children's Education Fund (UNICEF) recently issued a report saying that 19,000 children were working as sex workers in Lahore, India.
As many as 58 percent of the sex workers belonged to the poor families, according to UNICEF’s
"Commercial sexual exploitation of children in Lahore" report. Of the remaining workers, 37 percent are middle class and five percent are upper class.
Twenty-one percent of the children adopted the profession willingly. About 22 percent said their parents forced them into the sex trade and eight percent were forced by other factors, such as working in films.
The majority of sex workers were unhappy with their working conditions and income, according to the report. While 53 percent of them wanted to quit the trade, 60 percent of them were drug addicts. Worse still, 54 percent did not have any knowledge about HIV/Aids and its prevention.
http://www.newkerala.com/news.php?action=fullnews&id=64905
Plan to stop child labor starts in Negros
Romy G. Amarado, 10 Dec 2005
PHILLIPINES—A project to eliminate child labor in six areas in Negros Oriental, where exploitation of child workers is known to be rampant, will be implemented by a Church-run foundation here.
Msgr. Merlin T. Logronio, president of the Goretti Foundation Inc. run by the Diocese of Dumaguete, said the project, to be financed by the International Labor Organization-International Program for the Elimination of Child Labor (ILO-IPEC), will take education and livelihood as the main steps to eliminate child labor in the province.
The ILO-IPEC has provided P4.1 million for the project that will be implemented in the towns of Sta. Catalina, Siaton, Bindoy, Ayungon and Mabinay and Bais City, Logronio said.
Logronio said cases of child labor abound in these five towns and city as shown by the results of an earlier survey conducted by Silliman University.
He said child laborers in these places are commonly found in sugar cane plantations, in households as domestic laborers and in fishing vessels as deep-sea divers.
Logronio said the target of the year-long project is the more than 1,000 child laborers in the six towns and city and another more than 1,000 children from the same places who could become child laborers.
He said aside from the livelihood component of the project, the undertaking will focus also on ensuring that child laborers to go back to school and those who have difficulty in pursuing formal education will be encouraged to go into vocational courses.
Jess Macasil, ILO-IPEC field coordinator, said aside from the financial support his agency is extending to the project, it will also provide technical assistance to the project.
He also said while the funding for the project is a grant from ILO-IPEC, the livelihood component should not be a dole out.
http://news.inq7.net/regions/index.php?index=1&story_id=59515
A tale of two children
Rizza Aglobo, 8 Dec 2005
PHILLIPINES - There are six children in the family. He's the eldest. His name is Dondon. He's barely 11 years old, but he is the breadwinner in the family that lives in one of the most depressed areas of Dumaguete City.
His father seldom comes home, and if he does, he does not bring food for his children and his bedridden wife.
"I know I should be in school, but...I can't bear to see my mother and five other brothers and sisters cry from hunger so I had to stop schooling when I was in Grade 2 to look for a job," the boy said.
His haunts are the boulevard and the city pier where he peddles a few handfuls of peanuts in tiny sachets and plastic bags inside a tiny basket of woven rattan. More often than not, Dondon stays overnight at the boulevard where business is brisk especially during city celebrations.
"Sometimes, I had to force people to buy, by crying and being insistent because I needed the money for my family," he said.
In the very few times that his father comes home, he would scream at his children if he could not have food or money. Worse, he'd hurt any of the children he could lay hands on. None of the children has been brave enough to report the abuse to the police.
"Dondon is really a great help to us. Had it not been for him, we would not have anything to eat, to buy medicines when anyone gets sick. I am thankful that he is not into smoking or rugby sniffing," Dondon's mother, a frail and thin woman, said when interviewed in their run-down shanty.
Dondon is only one of the army of children eking out a living in this City of Gentle People that prides itself as a child-friendly city.
There is John (not his real name), a 12-year-old boy from the town of Zamboanguita, Negros Oriental. He has six other younger siblings. He does not go to school, but works to have food on the table for the family.
"Tatay is always drunk...he thrashes me whenever he sees me around. He shouts at us, calling us useless and more mouths to feed," John said.
Because he could no longer bear the abuses, he left home. John learned to live on his own as a parking motorcycle attendant of a fast food chain in the city's commercial district.
His average income is P15 (0.28US) per day. He considers himself lucky if he earned P30 (0.56US) a day.
Asked if he had plans to return home, he quickly replied, "No, I don't want to get bruised again. I'll go back home in due time."
Provincial social welfare officer Alicia Legarde blames poverty as one factor that forces parents to allow their children to work at a young age.
"There is no law penalizing parents for the exploitation of a child...they tolerate child labor, and it's a sad fact," Legarde said. "No parents would ever want to harm their children. But because of survival, a parent can't be blamed for thinking of their children as an extension of their manpower, like the sakadas beating up the pakyaw system in sugar cane harvesting."
International Labor Organization (ILO) figures show the Southern Tagalog region topping the list of regions with high percentage of working children or 461,000 children at work.
Central Visayas with 388,000 children working is next in the list followed closely by Eastern Visayas at 349,000 and Western Visayas. The statistics show that the Visayas area has the most number of abused children in terms of child labor.
An ILO survey also found that of the 1.5 million children receiving pay, 65 percent earn an average of less than P500 (9.32US) a week and 83 percent give their earnings to their parents.
"These surveys only show how useful the children could be in increasing the family's income. No wonder parents allow their children to work despite the hazards," Lilian Mondarte, labor employment officer said.
Some of the worst forms of child labor are child prostitution, small-scale mining and quarrying, heavy domestic labor, pyrotechnics, sugar cane plantations, and deep-sea fishing.
To the national government, poverty is considered the root of child labor and promoting universal basic education could eliminate it.
Surveys say otherwise. Most parents believe government priority must be on promoting livelihood programs for the family. Education, to them, must come second.
"They continue to educate us on the risks of allowing child labor. But after the seminar and information dissemination, what do we get? We cannot eat knowledge...we need food. We need decent livelihood with reasonable salary so we could not be tempted to send back our children into risky work," one mother commented.
http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/dum/2005/12/08/feat/a.tale.of.two.children.html
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UNICEF, unions unite to fight child labor
Alyssa Giachino, 1 Dec 2005
UNICEF joined forces with labor unions and the Labor Secretariat on Wednesday to launch a national public awareness campaign combating child labor.
At a press conference, UNICEF Mexico director Yoriko Yasukawa said the campaign is based on the idea that society must guarantee children's basic rights to an education and to play.
Poverty, she said, is one of the leading causes pushing children to work, and child labor "is a way to pass along the cost of inequality and injustice to the weakest members of society."
Also attending the press conference were representatives of the International Labor Organization (OIT), the Labor Secretariat (STPS), and labor organizations the Revolutionary Confederation of Peasants and Workers (CROC) and the Mexican Workers Confederation (CTM).
According to the National Statistics Institute (INEGI), Mexico has 3.3 million underage workers while the OIT puts the figure at 246 million worldwide.
There is a "culture of exploitation" of children in Mexico, said Mar 僘 Reyes Cordova, representative of the Labor Secretariat. She added that child labor is widely tolerated, and for that reason there is a great need for public education on the issue. The campaign aims to raise public awareness through publicity, seminars, and education in schools.
Child labor exists across industries, with agriculture employing 48 percent of working minors. Large numbers of children are also found in the informal economy, where 20 percent work as artisans and 14 percent as venders, Reyes said.
In agriculture, children often work alongside their parents, particularly in families that migrate from poor southern states to find work harvesting crops in other regions of the country. To tackle the problem, the government aid program "Oportunidades" offers scholarships for the children of agricultural workers as an incentive to stay in school, said Reyes.
The integration of children into the workforce is also a reflection of the competition Mexico faces in the global market said Mexican Workers Confederation representative Fernando Salgado.
Asian countries have "bombarded" the nation with cheap imports, many produced with child labor, said Salgado. This has contributed to a loss of formal jobs, particularly in manufacturing, pushing entire families into the informal economy, he added.
The Revolutionary Confederation of Peasants and Workers and the Mexican Workers Confederation have been negotiating language into their collective contracts that specifically prohibits child labor. They are also using their national membership networks to educate union workers on the issue.
To combat child labor, it is necessary to create more jobs for adults and improve wages so that parents' income is sufficient to support their families, said Yasukawa.
Most working minors don't attend school, which impacts their future job opportunities. Children may also suffer job-related injuries that could result in lifelong disabilities.
"If we lose our children, we lose the future of Mexico," said Salgado.
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/miami/vi_16044.html
Another School Barrier for African Girls: No Toilet
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
DATELINE: BALIZENDA, Ethiopia
Fatimah Bamun dropped out of Balizenda Primary School in first grade, more than three years ago, when her father refused to buy her pencils and paper. Only after teachers convinced him that his daughter showed unusual promise did he relent. Today Fatimah, 14, tall and slender, studies math and Amharic, Ethiopia's official language, in a dirt-floored fourth-grade classroom.
Whether she will reach fifth grade is another matter. Fatimah is facing the onset of puberty, and with it the realities of menstruation in a school with no latrine, no water, no hope of privacy other than the shadow of a bush, and no girlfriends with whom to commiserate. Fatimah is the only girl of the 23 students in her class. In fact, in a school of 178 students, she is one of only three girls who has made it past third grade.
Even the women among the school's teachers say they have no choice but to use the thorny scrub, in plain sight of classrooms, as a toilet.
''It is really too difficult,'' said Azeb Beyene, who arrived here in September to teach fifth grade. Here and throughout sub-Saharan Africa, schoolgirls can only empathize. In a region where poverty, tradition and ignorance deprive an estimated 24 million girls even of an elementary school education, the lack of school toilets and water is one of many obstacles to girls' attendance, and until recently was considered unfit for discussion. In some rural communities in the region, menstruation itself is so taboo that girls are prohibited from cooking or even banished to the countryside during their periods.
But that impact is substantial. Researchers throughout sub-Saharan Africa have documented that lack of sanitary pads, a clean, girls-only latrine and water for washing hands drives a significant number of girls from school. The United Nations Children's Fund, for example, estimates that one in 10 school-age African girls either skips school during menstruation or drops out entirely because of lack of sanitation.
The average schoolgirl's struggle for privacy is emblematic of the uphill battle for public education in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly among girls. With slightly more than 6 in 10 eligible children enrolled in primary school, the region's enrollment rates are the lowest in the world.
Beyond that, enrollment among primary school-aged girls is 8 percent lower than among boys, according to the United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef. And of those girls who enroll, 9 percent more drop out before the end of sixth grade than boys.
African girls in poor, rural areas like Balizenda are even more likely to lose out. The World Bank estimated in 1999 that only one in four of them was enrolled in primary school.
The issue, advocates for children say, is not merely fairness. The World Bank contends that if women in sub-Saharan Africa had equal access to education, land, credit and other assets like fertilizer, the region's gross national product could increase by almost one additional percentage point annually. Mark Blackden, one of the bank's lead analysts, said Africa's progress was inextricably linked to the fate of girls.
''There is a connection between growth in Africa and gender equality,'' he said. ''It is of great importance but still ignored by so many.''
The pressure on girls to drop out peaks with the advent of puberty and the problems that accompany maturity, like sexual harassment by male teachers, ever growing responsibilities at home and parental pressure to marry. Female teachers who could act as role models are also in short supply in sub-Saharan Africa: they make up a quarter or less of the primary school teachers in 12 nations, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Florence Kanyike, the Uganda coordinator for the Forum of Women Educationalists, a Nairobi-based organization that lobbies for education for girls, said the harsh inconvenience of menstruation in schools without sanitation was just one more reason for girls to stay home.
''They miss three or four days of school,'' she said. ''They find themselves lagging behind, and because they don't perform well, their interest fails. They start to think, 'What are we doing here?' The biggest number of them drop out in year five or six.''
Increasingly, international organizations, African education ministries and the continent's fledgling women's rights movements are rallying behind the notion of a '' girl friendly'' school, one that is more secure and closer to home, with a healthy share of female teachers and a clean toilet with a door and water for washing hands.
In Guinea, enrollment rates for girls from 1997 to 2002 jumped 17 percent after improvements in school sanitation, according to a recent Unicef report. The dropout rate among girls fell by an even bigger percentage. Schools in northeastern Nigeria showed substantial gains after Unicef and donors built thousands of latrines, trained thousands of teachers and established school health clubs, the agency contends.
Ethiopia has also made strides. More than 6 in 10 girls of primary-school age are enrolled in school this year, compared with fewer than 4 in 10 girls in 1999. Still, boys are far ahead, with nearly 8 in 10 of them enrolled in primary school.
Unicef is building latrines and bringing clean water to 300 Ethiopian schools. But more than half of the nation's 13,181 primary schools lack water, more than half lack latrines and some lack both. Moreover, those with latrines may have just one for 300 students, Therese Dooley, Unicef's sanitation project officer, said.
In theory, at least, outfitting Ethiopia's schools with basic facilities can be cheap and simple, she said. Toilets need be little more than pits and concrete slabs with walls and a door; rain can be trapped on a school's roof and strained through sand.
Still, she said, toilets for boys and girls must be clearly separate and students who may have never seen a latrine must be taught the importance of using one. And the toilets must be kept clean, a task that frequently falls to the very schoolgirls who were supposed to benefit most.
In Benishangul Gumuz Province in western Ethiopia, where low mountains rise over brilliant yellow fields of oilseeds, such amenities are rare indeed. Guma, a town of 13,000 about an hour's drive from Balizenda over a viciously rutted road, has water only sporadically. The town's main street is dotted with shops, but not one sells sanitary pads. Few residents could afford them anyway. Women make do with folded rags.
Balizenda primary school, with 178 students, is a long, litter-strewn building in a dirt clearing surrounded by brush. Two lopsided reed-walled huts pass for fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms. On the playground soccer field, three tree limbs lashed together form the goal.
With the exception of the first grade, where girls are more than a third of the pupils, Balizenda could be mistaken for an all-boys' school. Only 13 girls are enrolled in grades two through six, and even that is an improvement over three months ago.
''When I came here in September, there was not a single female student'' in the entire school, said Tisge Tsegaw, 22, the first-grade teacher. ''We went to the homes and motivated the parents, and then they came.''
But in many cases, not for long. ''The parents prioritize. They figure if the girls stay home, they can do the grinding, help with the harvesting, fetch the water and collect the firewood,'' Ms. Tsegaw said. ''They agree to enroll them. Then after two months, they take them back.''
The school's latrine, a hovel of thatch and reeds, fell down last year. Yehwala Mesfin, the school's director, said neither the villagers nor theEducation Ministry would help build a new one. Parents viewed their annual rebuilding of the reed-walled fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms as a sufficient contribution, he said.
Ms. Beyene, the fifth-grade teacher who arrived here in September, said she agreed to stay at Balizenda only after Mr. Mesfin promised that she could use a toilet at a health center nearby. But since then, the health center has been closed for lack of staff.
''The majority of time I use the open field,'' she said. ''There is no privacy. Everybody comes, even the students. So we try to restrict ourselves to urinate before school and at nighttime. I already have a kidney infection because of this. My situation is getting worse.''
The school's only sixth-grade girls, Mesert Mesfin, 17, and Worknesh Anteneh, 15, said that when they could not resist nature's call, they stood guard for each other in the field. When her period began one recent Thursday morning, Mesert said, she had no choice but to run home. Worknesh said she sometimes avoided school during her period.
''It is really a shame,'' she said. ''I am really bothered by this.''
Fatimah Bamun, who started school so late that at 14 she is only in fourth grade, said she did not want to miss a single class because she wanted to be a teacher. But, she added, she does not have a lot of backing from her friends.
''I have no friend in the class,'' she said. ''Most of my friends have dropped out to get married. So during the break, I just sit in the classroom and read.''
Her father, however, now says he is fully behind her. ''The people from the government are all the time telling us to send our daughters to school, and I am listening to these people,'' he said.
Neither Fatimah's older sister nor mother went to school. And Fatimah is all too familiar with the alternatives for illiterate girls. When she returns home after school each day, she is greeted by another girl, named Eko, who lives in her hut. Thin and poorly dressed, 12 years old at most, Eko is literally a wedding present, given to the Bamuns when Fatimah's sister married Eko's brother.
Before the wedding, Eko was an avid second grader. ''I liked school very much; it would have been better to stay in school,'' she said quietly, picking at her callused hands. Now she is the Bamun family servant, up at sunrise to pound sorghum with a stone for the breakfast porridge. Her education is vicarious.
''She always asks me, 'When are you going to school?' '' Fatimah said. '' 'What do you do there? What subjects do you study?' ''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
January 1, 2006
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