Fiser’s mother wants him to return to school some day
To see children’s silhouettes at sunrise, bent as they chop canes with machetes, is to see the scale of poverty in Bolivia, where often every member of the family, no matter how young, has to work.
Fiser, 10, is one of Bolivia’s many child labourers.
“I am not going to school any more. I left it this year when I started working here,” he tells me.
His hands are covered in blisters and dark with a sticky dust after hours harvesting sugar cane.
Child labour is illegal in Bolivia, but it is estimated that almost a third of the country’s children and adolescents (320,000) work in extreme conditions; in the mines, Brazil nut plantations and the sugar cane fields.
Boys like Fiser earn less than $5 a day during the six months or so that they work harvesting sugar cane, often from sunrise to sunset.
Such work is considered one of the worst forms of child labour by international bodies such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the UN children’s agency, Unicef.
Ciro, 13, is typical. “I’d like to study or maybe work in something better, something lighter. But I work most of all for my family, my family is really poor so they have nothing and I need to help my six little brothers,” he says.
“I wake up at four in the morning and come out to work until six in the afternoon, sometimes until eleven at night. The work is really, really hard.”
reports BBC NEWS – Americas
