Dearest Mommy and Daddy
Author unknown
When you wonder the meaning of life and love
Know that I am with you
Close your eyes and feel me kissing you in the gentle breeze across your cheek
When you begin to doubt that you shall never see me again
Quiet your mind and hear me
I am in the whisper of the heavens
Speaking of your love.
When you lose your identity
when you question who you are, where you are going;
Open your heart and see me.
I am the twinkle in the stars, smiling down upon you.
Lighting the path of your journey
When you awaken each morning, not remembering your dreams but feeling content and serene,
Know that I was with you, filling your night with thoughts of me.
When you linger in the remnant pain, wholeness seeming so unfamiliar, think of me.
Know that I am with you, touching you through the shared tears of a gentle friend easing the pain.
As the sunrise illuminates the desert sky; as that breathtaking brilliance awakens your spirit, think of our time together-all to brief but ever brilliant.
When you were certain of us together, when you were certain of your destiny, know that God created that moment in time just for us.
I am with you always……
Once upon a time, in 1986, there was a young boy named Saroo, who lived with his Mother and fatherless family in a small village in rural India. His impoverished Mother worked in a stone quarry, and Saroo often accompanied his idolized older brother as he scrounged for coins, coal and food in the nearby railway terminal. One day, he fell asleep in an empty train carriage, and ended hundreds of miles away from home, in Calcutta. He was only five years old.
The movie, Lion is the incredible true story about an Asian Indian child whose life is changed after being separated from his idolized older brother. He narrowly escapes being captured and sold into the sex trade, and from being forced into labor farms. Unable to remember where he is from, and failing all attempts to locate his home, he ends up in an orphanage. From there he is adopted into a benevolent Australian family who love him as their own, and who successfully raise Saroo into adulthood.
Some twenty years later, and sparked by a cultural gastronomical memory, Saroo becomes obsessed with finding his old home and birth Mother, using #Google Earth. He eventually finds his home town and is miraculously reunited with his birth Mother.
In his memoir, A Long Journey, Saroo Brierley chronicles his long ordeal, and now his story has now been made into an amazing film called Lion.
The film Lion is a beautiful example of a true story, fantastic photography, and exceptional acting that will wrench your emotions, and leave you in floods of tears.
But in addition to being a wonderful story, the movie raises awareness of a much more important issue. It illustrates of how easily children become lost, or kidnapped in India, and how desperate the issue of missing children has become..............
Every six minutes, a child goes missing in India. Most May Never Be Found.
Globally, trafficking of children for forced labor and sexual exploitation remains a “largely hidden crime,” says the International Labor Organization, with no reliable data even existing on the scale of the problem.
“A couple of decades ago, there was no understanding of the issue of missing children or trafficking for forced labor — child labor was not even considered a crime,” said Bhuwan Ribhu, an activist for the children’s rights group.
Kidnapping represents just the tip of the iceberg of a vast child-trafficking industry in India. Many young children are sold by their parents or enticed from them with the promise that they will be looked after and be able to send money home. Never registered as missing, many simply lose touch with their parents, working long hours in garment factories or making cheap jewelry.
As a conservative estimate 5.5 million children are trapped in forced labor, but in India alone, the government estimates between 5 and 12 million children are forced to work.
The Global Missing Children's Network is a multilingual database featuring photos of and information about missing children from around the world. It was launched in 1998 as a joint program of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children® and International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children®. http://www.missingkids.com/GMCN
There are 25 participating countries in the Global Missing Children's Network; interestingly, India is not among the participants.
“Child Labor is the practice of having children engages in economic activity, on a part- or full-time basis. The practice deprives children of their childhood, and is harmful to their physical and mental development. Poverty, lack of good schools and the growth of the informal economy are considered to be the key causes of child labor in India.”
(Wikipedia.com)
In the late 1700's and early 1800's, power-driven machines replaced hand labor for making most manufactured items. Factories began to spring up everywhere, first in England and then in the United States. The factory owners found a new source of labor to run their machines — children. Operating the power-driven machines did not require adult strength, and children could be hired more cheaply than adults. By the mid-1800's, child labor was a major problem.
http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/childlabor/
https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/history-child-labor/
In her article entitled, “Sacrificial Lambs of Globalization: Child Labor in the Twenty-First Century”, Panjabi, Ranee Khooshie Lal, wrote in the Denver Journal of International Law and Policy:
Economic "progress" has been largely at the expense of the most vulnerable elements of almost every society. Those elements, the poor, the illiterate, and particularly the children of the poor have paid a terrible price so that we in the richer countries might enjoy an orgy of consumerism at reasonable prices. Our need to buy and consume, but always at very low prices, has required that food and manufactured goods be produced to sell inexpensively but still provide sufficient profit. One methodology to achieve this aim is to utilize either very cheap labor--hence the export of manufacturing from the West to the developing world-or worse, much worse, to use slavery and child labor, and pay almost nothing to those who make our goods and harvest our food.
https://www.questia.com/read/1G1-206110327/sacrificial-lambs-of-globalization-child-labor-in
According to a Guardian newspaper article in 2007,
Child workers, some as young as 10, have been found working in a textile factory in conditions close to slavery to produce clothes that appear destined for Gap Kids, one of the most successful arms of the high street giant.
Speaking to The Observer, the children described long hours of unwaged work, as well as threats and beatings.
According to one estimate, more than 20 per cent of India's economy is dependent on children, the equivalent of 55 million youngsters under 14.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/oct/28/ethicalbusiness.retail
In his fantastic photographic photo-blog which I encourage you to read,
Tanmoy Bhaduri documents examples of child exploitation in the brick kilns of Bengal.
Children are often forced to sleep in the scorching sun. Even basic education and medical treatment is a distant dream in these brick kilns.
Article: http://www.huffingtonpost.in/tanmoy-bhaduri/photoblog-the-brick-kiln-kids-of-bengal/
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Child Labour by Mehreen Mujeeb (English spelling of Labor.)
Why should we suffer?
Why should we pay?
Why should we do this every day?
We are tired of doing this everyday
Stop child labour
It’s like they don’t know how we feel
Because our age doesn’t seem that real
But we feel more pain than they do
And for what they’re doing
They should be sued
We are sick of doing this everyday
Stop child labour
Our cuts and bruises aren’t healing
As we do this day by day
It’s like they feel, but have no feelings
And aren’t bothered of what we have to say
We are tired of doing this everyday
Stop child labour
They get paid with the tears we shed
We get no love or a bed
We need some help
So someone help us please
Help us get some dignity
Have the courage to raise your voice
To help those in need
Those whose voices are so shattered
And whose lungs cannot breathe
We are sick of doing this everyday
Stop child labour
Our sunken eyes are tired of crying
Our hearts are sick of dying
Just remember
You were a child once too
We deserve a life
A life where we have no work to do
We are tired of doing this everyday
Stop child labour
So what we’re saying is not just noise
If you had a heart
You’d hear a voice
And stop child labour
Mehreen Mujeeb
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/child-labour-4/
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In 1863, Charles Kingsley wrote his famous novel, The Water Babies.
It is the story of a young chimney sweep named Tom, who is chased out of a house after meeting an upper-class girl named Ellie.
While running away, he falls into a river, where he drowns, and is transformed into a Water Baby. Instructed by a Caddisfly, an insect that sheds its’ skin, he begins his moral education.
The story is predominantly a conduit for preaching Victorian moralistic virtues and Christian redemption, but it also includes a political element. It includes a storyline critical of child labor, particularly that of child chimney sweeps. In fact, one year after the book was published, the Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act of 1864 was passed, prohibiting the use of minors as chimney sweeps in the UK.
Another contemporary book which addresses the issue of child labor is
Boys Without Names
by Kashmira Sheth
“For eleven-year-old Gopal and his family, life in their rural Indian village is over: We stay, we starve, his baba has warned. So they must flee to the big city of Mumbai in hopes of finding work and a brighter future. Gopal is eager to help support his struggling family until school starts, so when a stranger approaches him with the promise of a factory job, he jumps at the offer.
But Gopal has been deceived. There is no factory but, instead, a small, stuffy sweatshop, where he and five other boys are forced to make beaded frames for no money and little food. The boys are forbidden to talk or even to call one another by their real names. In this atmosphere of distrust and isolation, locked in a rundown building in an unknown part of the city, Gopal despairs of ever seeing his family again.”
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6580712-boys-without-names
And now for my own poem, written for a young girl called Senna. I composed this after watching the film, Girl’s Rising.
I found it a powerful and moving documentary about contemporary young girls who are striving to become free of the bondages of poverty or the cultural shackles, of forced labor, to become educated and self-actualized…
For Senna, by Womensvoice1
Trudging through toxic mud
that sludges over frozen rock
jagged with the dark grey mountainside
burdened with muted pain
She tumbles into mud holes filled with the poorest but bravest hearts
Her father slowly gasping his last breath
midst eighty thousand swarming bodies in the mines
Sweat soaked
for one small fleck of golden glitter
The black heralds of death fold their wings around
and suck him under the mountain
leaving her stranded
Stunned
unable to move
Slowly
she reaches deep down into her own heart
to discover a cache of buried gems
Pearls of poetic expression
Citrines of courage
Diamonds of determination
Her tongue becomes a sword of tempered words
Sparked by the blow of the pick axe on hard rock
Cutting like finest steel through the railway tracks
to switch the course of life and join the education train
I can do this!
I WILL rise, she cries!
Child of the dump
Hunting in the rot
Daydreaming of the alphabet
Blooming like a flower without water
in a sea of dry sand
Skipping through life
Holding on to hope
Images in her head
of wonder
what could be
Her future painted with colors
festooning grey skies
Another unlucky girl
bonded to her master
begins to sing
so that others can break loose
the bonds of slavery
Cycling to break the cycle
Turning heads to turn tradition
A new perspective
New angles in a Yang dominated world
Breaking their ride at each domicile
The power of educated persuasion
over blind belief
An early morning marriage
Aged 13
Trapped in a blue embroidered cage
Forcibly split by the heavy piston of penetrating dogma
Fearing for her life
yet fueling the force of change
like a thousand rivers birthing through her womb
turning ugliness into art
darkness into light
fear into will
until that shroud of blue
once masked and muted
begins to break song
like a nightingale for all to hear
a song that pierces the darkest night
and wakens the deepest sleep
I know I can
I know I can rise!
She hears the rhythm of the train
As it gathers momentum
And the roar of the train becomes deafening and irresistible
Education becomes her POWER
The train picks up speed
POWER can change the world.
I will Rise
She will rise
They WILL rise!
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Child labor remains one of the biggest issues of our time. While international humanitarian companies may be doing their best to improve things, many companies continue to fund cheap labor and sweatshops in the production of their goods. While amnesty groups expose the very worst cases, there is still an alarming incidence of child exploitation. If we really want to make a change, we should pay attention to the products we buy, and the factories we fund as a result.
other refs:
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/A-law-that-allows-child-labour/article14560563.ece
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We live in the house we all build. By Vita Pascone. www.vitalifestyledesign.com
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