Child Labor

The busy and extravagant world of the urban city, filled with tall skyscrapers and multi-dollar corporations. A thin screen to hide the ugliness of a worldwide disease that seems to be industriously multiplying, poverty.

A scarcity that has brought a race for survival as one strives to bring bread to the table. Children are forced prematurely to face the intense competition of life, to work and be deprived of the simplicity of childhood.

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Last Friday, our Religion teacher allowed us to watch a documentary "Minsan Lang Silang Bata" (They Are Children Only Once). The film focused on three examples of child labor being tolerated here in the Philippines, where children are not only asked to work, they are given tasks which are not only grotesquely difficult for their age, but also are brutal to their healths.. for so little pay. We were asked to pass a reflection paper answering the two questions below.. These are my answers.

In what way are you “like” the kids? Unlike them?

There are many ways that link me and the kids presented in the documentary. First and foremost, we are both humans, and thus are both able to feel comfort and pain, love and hate, happiness and sadness – feelings, worries and thoughts derived from our daily human experiences. Second, we are both citizens of this country, the Philippines. We are both given the same rights and responsibilities as people of the country. I am unlike them in the small matter that I am, firstly, in an urban community wherein knowledge and perspectives are far more advanced, where oppression is more likely to be exposed rather than ignored. Second, unlike them, I benefited all my rights, since my parents are aware of them and are relatively well-to-do to defend them for me. In this matter, I have been educated and thus later on could defend myself and my family in the future. Not being properly educated gives one less chances to excel especially now in the information era where knowledge is key to success.

What should be done to evangelize (convert) the problem of child labor?

In order to evangelize the problem of child labor, there must be adequate transformation from our persons. A full scale action sprouts from a single ardent flame of willingness and dedication. We should immerse ourselves to their situations; research and learn more about them to somehow understand their places. It is through this action, that we could completely feel for them, as well find the reasons of their state, thus allowing us to find the roots of their suffering and cut it off. More importantly, we must have compassion and love within us in order to commit ourselves to such a cause. Through love, we teach them love. Through love, we can bring them justice, and hopefully, peace.

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Every child is a light that is burning with enthusiasm to bring forth the hope for the future. We all are dreamers, we all are wishers. We all are children. We close our eyes and dream of becoming somebody someday, we visualize a cozy little house with a loving partner and a pair of adorable children to play at our feet, and yet life has a twisted sense of humor. Instead of the life we hope, we ar faced with reality, the cruel path of greedy businessmen, of self centered politicians. There is no scarcity of blindness in men, but there is a plague that kills hearts that live for the very reason of life, love.

The children are stripped of their pleasant dreams and thrown helplessly into the clutches of a busy money-hogging community, where they are forced to soil their tiny hands and plead for a few coins to survive. This practice instills materialism, destroys friendships, limits possibilities, ruins morality and crumbles the ideal world that we as children have so innocently desired and wanted and needed.

Let us not kill their dreams. Let us not kill their hopes. Let us not kill our children. Let us not kill our future.