Dispatches International
soon as my children will start to grow up, people not take pity on my situation. They will ask me to send them for a job.” Talking to Rahima reveals
the attitudes of parents who send their children to work, but the children themselves are rare- ly consulted.
I seek out Mizan, a
ten-year-old child laborer. “I am not mature, but my family ex- pects me to act mature. I am the only earning member of the fam- ily.” He states these rather pre- cocious words in spite of being illiterate and utterly uneducat- ed. Mizan is skinny; he has been starving for almost a week. Some would say Mizan
works, but it seems that he is worked. He was tricked by his uncle, Solaiman, into being sold as a type of indentured laborer and is now being severely tor- tured by his master. Solaiman brought him into the city one year ago and promised to pro- vide him with a better education as well as a decent job. As soon as they arrived, Solaiman signed a contract with Mizan’s current boss, Hassem. The uncle was paid $1,000 BDT, or $14 USD, in exchange for the boy. Brought up in an extend-
ed family, Mizan has always witnessed and experienced the misery of poverty. His family of ten had one member earning an income. When I asked Mizan about the employment of his parents and their contribution to his welfare, he began to cry.
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“My mom died after my birth,” he whimpered. “Maybe my birth is inauspicious.” Mizan works in a tea-stall
beside the Asian University for Women. He sells betel leaf and light snacks. Mizan works ex- tremely hard in the small shop all day long and returns to his so-called home only to prepare snacks for the next day. “I go home and start preparing snacks for the next day,” he says. “Most of the nights I can’t sleep be- cause of that. The nights I sleep, I rarely get two or three hours of sleep.”
In addition to working be-
yond the physical limits of a ten- year-old boy, Mizan is unfairly paid. Few would regard his in- come as a living wage. Mizan tells me that he is paid $500 BDT per month, or $7.14 USD. “This is not at all enough to support my family. I give the money to my grandmother,” he says. “As no one else in my family works, this meager amount is what I can afford to give them for ex- penses.” For owners of tea-stalls
and purveyors of betel leaf and light snacks, the cost of any la- bor is modest but the cost of child labor is even less. Children are easy to discipline, naïve of exploitative schemes, and are rarely in a position to run away when they have been cheated. Therefore, employers frequently prefer children to adults as labor- ers. “I prefer children to adults,”
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