Iqbal and you: Kids at work.

I Am The Child: A Play For Voices,

based on an article by Eduardo Galeano

It is estimated that, worldwide, 250 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 work on a regular basis. Of these 250 million, some 180 million are virtual slaves. Children are preferred by employers because they work cheaply, do not complain, and are easy to bully.

Voice 1:

You know me,

I am The Child.

You see me in the garbage dumps of Mexico City

And Manila, and Lagos,

Where I fight the vultures for your garbage.

Voice 2

The pearls that decorate your necks?

I dove for them in the Java Sea,

The diamonds at your fingers?

I dug them up in the Congo.

You must know me.

Voice 3:

I am the child in mines of Peru,

The mole in the mineshaft

Cursed and enslaved because I am small.

When the poison air murders me at last,

They throw me away in fields of nameless graves,

And at last the sun shines on me.

Voice 1

Colombia, Tanzania, Guatemala –

I am the Child.

Your lattes and your espressos

Were bought with the blood

Of my innocence. Your bananas

From Honduras – It is I your pesticides kill

For I am the Child.

From dark to dark I work in Malaysia

Collecting rubber from the trees.

They murder me on the streets of Brazil

And no one cares,

Of course, I am not your child

Why should you consider me?

Voice 2

In Burma, I work the railroads,

In India, the infernos of glass and brick.

In Bangladesh, I harvest the bitter tea

You sip at breakfast.

Arab Sheiks tie me to their camels

And watch them race because my terrified screams

Inspire their animals to run.

Voice 4

You with your Wall Street Journal,

You in your corporate towers the world around,

Do you consider me?

In Argentina, the mighty Plata rolls by

As I herd sheep and cattle.

In Jakarta and Recife I serve at your table

Because only am I entitled to eat what you throw away.

Come to Lima, you will see me there (if you see me at all)

I will wash your car window for pennies,

I juggle or eat fire begging in Guadalajara-

You know me – I am the Child

Can you look me in the eye?

Voice 3

The ball your bigleague millionaires hit out of the park-

I stitched it together in Honduras and in Haiti. Your football stars

Chase one I stitched in Pakistan.

Your children swing and slide and dance,

But I shall never know what it is to play.

Voice 5

To pay my parents’ debts, I was chained to the loom.

In Pakistan when I was four

and was murdered for speaking out.

My parents’ poverty in your New World Order is

So great that they sold me, and now I weave rugs

from dawn to midnight.

I am the child in a hell of your making.

And when they come to rescue me I say,

“Are you my new master?”

Voice 1

In Sri Lanka I pick tobacco, in Egypt,

Jasmine for French perfume.

In Ohio I harvest cranberries.

In California, your Belle Provence,

I awaken in the bitter night to go and pick cotton

In Tulare’s endless fields. You know me.

All Voices

I am the child. You know me.

There are a quarter billion of me the world around.

But then I am only a child.

Who are you?

With each successive age, we hear another reason why the ruling class is rich and powerful, and why they deserve to be so, and why the rest of us are not, and don't deserve to be. Natural Order. The Will of God. Superior breeding. The Divine Right of Kings. Social Darwinism. Liberty. And now, The Market. The Market, this latest myth goes, will efficiently distribute wealth and resources, reward initiative and innovation, and (by implication) reward the deserving. The corollary is that if you are not rich, you are somehow undeserving. All we have to do is look out for our own self-interest and get the government to stop regulating everything. The so-called "invisible hand" orders and manages everything. Unmasked, it is simply another way to keep us working and doubting ourselves. If we look around, if we teach kids"read the world," we can see right away that The Market is the religion of the powerful and the rich. Probably the strongest indictment against the Market, and all the excuses for the power of the few over the many is the widespread - quarter of a billion, most of them slaves - presence of children in the workplace. Nowhere is the power of the rich, the mighty, and the greedy so clearly asserted. In years past, it would be said of them that this was their place in the Natural Order, or that their parents had been unfit, and so they were too. They might be told that they were part of a Divine Plan to the Glory of God. Nowadays, we must realize that they are more or less slaves because people decide that they shall be I have heard of people who claim that child labor is good because the labor of children produces items that help the country's economy. Some claim that child labor is an ancient tradition. There is a good film put out by AFT called "Stolen Futures." Kids sit up and watch right away. But there is something to watch for: many Child labor books and courses ignore the fact of Child Labor in the US, now. The Story of Iqbal Masih This, too, is the Status Quo, the Way It Is.