After the Juvenile Rehabilitation Center we continue to visit the project of a French NGO, funded by UNICEF. Enfants du Monde [EMDH] aims to provide support to street working children. Activities started in August 2009 and once fully set-up there will be seven centers in Kabul-city where children can come to play, warm up and get an informal education – before/after their daily duties in the streets.
In one of the centers we meet Mohammed. He is 10 years old and works every day from 11am to 5 pm, selling plastic bags. The boy has five brothers and two sisters. While the girls stay at home with their mother, the boys are all deployed in one petty labor or another – to pay the depth of their father.
Mohamed’s father had a shop – but one evening last year he was robbed. Since he lost all his earnings the family was unable to pay back credits taken upon the shop commodities. The father escaped from his creditors to Iran and has not returned to Afghanistan ever since. Mohamed earns about 50 Afghanis per day (1 USD).
Subsequently to the center we follow the NGO’s social workers to a place in the stomach of Kabul, where dry fruits are being packaged (Afghanistan is producing delicious raisins and almonds). After ten minutes walk (no passage for cars) through crowed places, narrow streets and damp tunnels we reach a courtyard where dozens of children and women crouch on the floor. It is freezing cold.
One of the women tells us that an average working day starts at seven in the morning and finishes at seven in the evening – seven days per week. If they manage to do their daily quantity – 120 kilos – they earn 120 Afghanis (2.5 USD). None of them has gone to school or has the prospect of doing so. Only women and children work here.
The owner of the place and only man present, a witty man of Indian/Afghan origin, gives us his perspective of the employment situation: ‘You know, if these people could not come here they would have to take up a dangerous work, they had to go for prostitution or else. That’s why we give them a job here – so that they can have a decent income without danger. You know.” Well yes, somehow we know
Our container castles have started to become home and compared to the average accommodation of Afghans, or the living conditions of Safia and Mohamed they are pure luxury. Everything is relative – from figures over justice to comfort. At least life is not too simple. Tashakor
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