The following article is written by Anna Badkhen and appears on the Foreign Policy.com website at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/26/kids_at_work_in_afghanistan. The following paragraph provides a framework for the specific examples she describes in other parts of the article.
"Despite the billions of international aid dollars funneled into Afghanistan since 2001, the country is weighed down by crushing poverty -- a burden that falls heavily on children. The United Nations estimates that one-third of Afghanistan's children under 14 work. Drive out of any city in any direction, and you will see children as young as seven herding livestock, tilling fields, leveling dirt roads. Peek inside the shops of Dasht-e-Shor Street: Half of the workforce on this grimy boulevard appears to be children. There are child welders, child carpenters, child auto mechanics, child haulers of bags of cement, child shredders of carrots for someone else's pilau."
Badken finds from her interviews that some children start working as young as 7 years old, they work long hours, and get little or no money (e.g., working for an uncle out of family loyalty or gratitude). Most have little formal education. Even before they reach their adolescence, they have the faces of old men, she observes. The faces of poverty and exploitation, exacerbated or generated by war and foreign occupation.
Anna Badkhen's reporting trip to Afghanistan is supported by a grant from the Center for Investigative Reporting. Her book about war and food, Peace Meals, is coming out in October.
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Stop the war in Afghanistan - YES.
ReplyDeleteBut free the people from fear, free the women from being chattel, free the girls from ignorance by allowing their education, free the country from war lords and bandits.
Now, just how to do that without making war?
Read Malalai Joya's book, A Woman Among Warlords, as one response to this question. And read about the example of Greg Mortenson achievements at winning the trust of village elders and building schools and other facilities in the remote areas of northeast Afghanistan for other ideas on how reconstruction can be achieved without war. His books are titled: Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools.
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