Children at Work

The Sahel, Africa

 

In developing countries one in six children from 5 to 14 years old is involved in child labor.

 

 

 

Ship-breaking yard, Mumbai, India

 

 

Lhasa, Tibet

 

 

In the least developed countries, 30 percent of all children are engaged in child labor.

 

 

Marpha, Nepal

 

 

Worldwide, 126 million children work in hazardous conditions, often enduring beatings, humiliation and sexual violence by their employers.

 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

The highest proportion of child laborers is in sub-Saharan Africa, where 26 percent of children (49 million) are involved in work.

 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

Kandahar, Afghanistan

 

 

An estimated 1.2 million children — both boys and girls — are trafficked each year into exploitative work in agriculture, mining, factories, armed conflict or commercial sex work.

 

 

Mandalay, Myanmar/ Burma

 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

Bamiyan, Afghanistan 

 

 

“Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together,  and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.” -  Grace Abbott

 

 

 

Pul i Khumri, Afghanistan

 

 

 Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

Pul i Khumri, Afghanistan

 

 ImagineAsia’s Storybook Project for Afghan Children

The mission of ImagineAsia, a 501c3 non-profit organization, is to work in partnership with local community leaders and regional NGO’s to help students in Afghan communities receive fundamental educational materials and resources. 

IA  has started to translate Aesop’s fables into Dari for the children of Afghanistan who have never had a book of their own.  Translated and illustrated by volunteers, these stories will reach families in remote areas of the country.

For thousands of years the fables have revealed universal truths through simple allegories.  The stories often use animals to  teach lessons that are easily understood by people of all ages.

Here are some sample pages:

The Lion and the Mouse –  illustrated by Jason Melcher

 

 The Boy Who Cried Wolf - illustrated by Kate Raines

 

Pitcher and the Crow -  illustrated by Lois Andersen

 

 

An Afghan Folktale – The Silver on the Hearth – illustrated by Kate Harrold

 

 

Tortoise and Hare –  illustrated by Kate Harrold

 

 

The Donkey and its Purchaser – illustrated by Kate Harrold

 

 

The Sun and the Wind – illustrated by Annie Zimmerman

 

 

 The Fox and the Goat – illustrated by Jason Melcher

 

 http://www.imagine-asia.org/

 

Sources: http://www.unicef.org, http://www.ilo.org, www.crin.org

G O A L – Football Fever

Sitwe, Burma, 1996

 

Whether you say futbol, futebol, voetbal, soccer, футбол, or calcio, you already know that football is the most popular sport on the planet.  This World Cup Tournament final match will be the most-watched event in television history.

Burma, 2010

More than simply kicking a ball around, football stirs passions, and crosses every boundary of nationality, race, class, generations, and religion.

Burma, 1984

 

Istanbul, Turkey, 1998

Yemen, 1999

 

Herat, Afghanistan, 2003 

 

Football is played in every corner of the globe by every child who sees a moving ball and kicks it.

The Sahel, Africa, 1986

 

Morocco, 1998

 

“Some people say football is a matter of life and death.  I assure you, it’s much more important than that.” -Bill Shankley

Bangladesh, 1983

Occupational Hazards

photo by Borut Sraj

One of the scariest experiences I’ve had in my career was crashing into a frigid glacial lake in the former Yugoslavia while on assignment for National Geographic.

A twilight moon rises above the Kamniske mountains and Slovenia’s Sava River Valley, Slovenia.

I had hired a small, ultra-light, two-seater airplane in to do aerials over Bled Lake in Slovenia. The pilot flew down to the surface of the lake, very, very close — in fact so close that I told him to go up because we were only about five feet from the water.  If I had wanted to be that close I could have hired a boat, but it was too late. The wheels got caught in the water and we couldn’t pull out. We went down and as soon as the fuselage and the propeller hit the water, the propeller blew apart.

Rijeka, Croatia, 1989

We flipped upside down in the 40-degree water in the middle of February and immediately began to sink. The cockpit was not enclosed. The seatbelt was a jerry-rigged homemade device and I hadn’t studied it and couldn’t get it off me.

I realized I was going to die. I guess that part of your brain concerned with self-preservation kicked in, and I slid underneath the contraption, literally went underneath, and was able to swim to the surface. The pilot made it, but didn’t attempt to help me.  My passport and equipment went to the bottom. Fortunately the pilot and I were picked up by a fisherman within ten minutes. Days later the plane was raised but all of my equipment is still 60 feet down.

Picture of me in Lubiana before going to Lake Bled where my plane crashed.

There was another airplane incident in Africa.  Again, I was on assignment photographing the Sahel, that band of land that separates the Sahara Desert from the grasslands of the Savannah.

We got lost flying from Timbuktu in Mali back to the capital of Bamako. We had left in a sandstorm and started flying along the Niger River. I guess the pilot’s navigational instruments weren’t working. He literally could not find his way back to the capital.

 

Chari River in the Sahel region near N’Djamena, Chad.

I watched him circling and I started to wonder what was going on.   He came back down through the clouds. It was getting dark and there was a huge thunderstorm right in our path.  The pilot dropped the small craft to search for his bearings.

Fuel was getting low, and we could never make it back to Timbuktu.  To the south, an enormous black wall of clouds loomed from the horizon – a monsoon storm.  In vain, for a half an hour we scanned the landscape searching for an opening.  We had no radio contact, and and no navigational equipment.  We prepared our last thoughts.

Finally, the pilot spotted a millet field, agonizingly small, but flat.  As we thundered in, I watched the wheel of the plane miss a six-foot hole by a few steps.

Muddy field, Mali

We shuddered to a stop with a few hard bounces.  Villagers ran out from the surrounding bush in wonderment as the sky opened up.   We slept on the plane that night, and finally found a vehicle to take us back to the capital city of Bamako, fourteen hours of bone-rattling roads.

Niger River, Mali