I asked one basic question: What must be done to eliminate child labour in Bangladesh?
“Good primary education must be available to all children,” said one.
“No,” interrupted another. “These children must have vocational training if they are to find jobs.”
The third broke in quickly: “Primary education and vocational training are both useless, my friends, if we don’t have more economic growth and foreign investment.”
The three of them began to argue among themselves. At first they politely debated their colleagues’ opinions, and attempted to elaborate on their own. Gradually the tension grew, however, and the politeness gave way to bickering and amplified into a full-fledged war of words.
Then the most incredible thing happened. The man who had driven us to the meeting, a chauffeur employed by UNICEF, became so frustrated with the academics that he turned away from them and began to explain to us his own ideas on what should be done to end child labour. As the three experts continued to argue, Alam and I listened to the chauffeur with great interest. He knew working children because he lived and worked with them every day.
I caught the eye of the UNICEF representative, and she began to chuckle. It was enough to touch off the same response from Alam. Soon both of them broke out laughing. Even the driver threw his head back and joined in. I placed my hand over my face to cover the smile that was spreading from ear to ear.
The academics finally stopped their arguing and turned to us in bewilderment. I did my best to apologize for the outburst, and the others gained control of themselves, though we were careful not to look at each other. The meeting continued and we took the discussions in a new direction, all of us now listening to the chauffeur.
I did see some good work done on behalf of child workers. Underprivileged Children’s Education Programme (UCEP), for example, had set up a huge skills-training centre. There I encountered young people hard at work learning a wide variety of trades, including carpentry, metal work, sewing and weaving. They had been given a stipend of 325 taka a month to substitute for the money they would have earned as child labourers.
Another group, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), operates over 30,000 primary schools throughout the country with close to a million children taking part. To its great credit, BRAC has made a strong effort to bring young girls into its programs, with the result that at least seventy per cent of the students (ages eight to sixteen) are female.
Still, sometimes the enormity of the problem of child labour overwhelmed me. Was there, in fact, anything that young people in other countries could do that would really make a difference?
It was a question I asked the representative of UNICEF, an impressive man from the Netherlands, who saw clearly the responsibility of all people to help exploited children. “The very best thing you and the other young people in Free The Children can do is spend your time and the money you raise to educate your own people on the importance of international aid. Help them understand what is happening in poor countries. People in rich countries have to learn to share, to learn how to do with less. They have a psychological need to buy, buy, buy. They are consumed with the idea that they need more, more, more.”
I thought about some of my friends at school, of how important it was to have the newest style of basketball shoes, or the sweatshirt with the right logo. And I thought of my bedroom at home. The video games piled high. All the clothes that filled the closet, all the toys stuffed under my bed. Did I really need all those things? Was it fair that I had so much and the kids I had seen in the slums had nothing?
“Do you really think it makes people happy to have so many possessions?” he asked.
I didn’t have an answer for him.
“If anyone looked seriously at the poor nations, they would see how it is absolutely unacceptable for people in a country like Bangladesh to be living the way they are.”
It left me with a lot to think about. I realized that it’s not enough to look at these people and condemn their child labour practices. The truth is—we are part of the problem, too.
1 The Grameen Bank, under the direction of its founder, Muhammad Yunus, has created a banking system to meet the needs of the poor throughout rural Bangladesh. Over 90 per cent of its loans go to women. Yunus has said, “These millions of small people with their millions of small pursuits can add up to create the biggest development wonder.”
2 As a result of the Harkin Bill, a “Memorandum of Understanding” was proposed to Bangladesh’s garment manufacturers by the American ambassador to Bangladesh and other US officials. It included a monitoring program that would prevent child workers from being suddenly dismissed, and would instead allow them to be gradually phased out of the garment industry over a three-year period to September 1, 1997. Adult relatives of the dismissed children would be given preference for their jobs. Education would be made available for the children.
The members of the Bangladesh garment manufacturers voted against the plan. They did not feel it was their responsibility to provide rehabilitation programs for the children.
Consequently, many children were dismissed without alternative opportunities being in place for them. Seeing that many of the children were worse off, the International Labour Organization, UNICEF and the Bangladesh Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BG-MEA) signed an agreement to provide schooling and a stipend for children under fourteen who had lost their jobs in garment factories. Over two hundred schools were opened.
On the positive side, the Harkin Bill helped to raise greater awareness of the issue of child labour. Governments and business leaders in developing countries, concerned about their exports and financial markets, have begun to take action against child labour in all sectors, not only the export market.
The negative effects, however, are on the children themselves. There is the risk of the children ending up in worse situations, unless programs and alternative sources of income are set up for them before they are dismissed from the factories.
Following our stay in Bangladesh, we planned to go to Thailand. We would travel by a combination of rickshaw, bus and ferry to Calcutta, India, then take a flight from there to Bangkok, Thailand. We had already purchased tickets for this leg of our journey before leaving Canada. But getting out of Dhaka proved to be a major challenge. The transit dispute had spread, and now the city was gradually being shut down by a general strike. All public services were affected. On the advice of Alam’s relatives, we decided to leave early, before everything ground to a halt.
We packed our bags and headed to the bus station by rickshaw. The lineup for tickets to get out of the city was already long, with every seat in the waiting room taken and mounds of luggage everywhere. We lined up for our tickets, then found a spot on the waiting room floor. There were no signs of a bus anywhere, and no one had information about when we could expect one. There was nothing we could do but wait. I strapped myself to the luggage and fell asleep.
At about eleven at night I was awakened by Alam’s gentle prodding. A bus had finally arrived. It was not our scheduled bus, which was lost somewhere en route, but a bus substituted to transport people to the Indian border. The bulkier pieces of luggage were thrown up onto the bus’s roof rack. Whatever was left was stuffed inside. Off we went into the night, a herd of humanity, draped over our possessions, all longing for sleep.
At about two or three in the morning, after two hours of weaving a route through the maze of vehicles in a constant lurching line of stop-and-go traffic, we came to a dead and final stop.
“What’s going on?” I mumbled sleepily to Alam.
“It doesn’t look good,” he said.
In the blackness, we had little idea what was happening. The bus driver shouted back at us the dreaded details. The trucks and buses were coming off the ferry at the other end. In their hurry to get to Dhaka, they were using both lanes of the two-lane road. We had met them head-on, with a