Child Labour Talks

Child Labour Talks

Now that school has officially started, each Thursday I will be doing Child Labour education talks in local schools. This week Freeman, who is the child trafficking project director, and I went to Ebenezer Memorial School in Nyanyano to give the presentation. The class takes about one hour and we presented to the 5^th and 6^th graders first and the 3^rd and 4^th graders second.

We start with introductions and asking what people wanted to be when they grow up. It is interesting hearing their answers. Almost all of the girls said they wanted to be nurses. For the boys, answers varied between, doctor, bank manager, soldier, and footballer. We stressed the importance of education in their quest to achieve their future jobs, but most of the children already seemed very motivated to finish their education. Some talked about even wanting a Master’s degree after university. The fact that there are many things that can stand in the way of a child’s education, lead us into the topic of child labour. We started with an activity where we passed each child a card that had a picture of a child working. The students were told to look at their picture and decide if this was “good work” or “bad work”. These talks reminded me a lot of the child sexual abuse talks that I gave in Costa Rica, but instead of good touching and bad touching it was good work and bad work. We talked about how “light work” such as cleaning the house, fetching water, helping your father untangle his nets after school was fine for a child to do as long as it did not stop them from going to school. “Heavy work” or dangerous work such as quarry work, selling water on the roadside, agricultural work, was very different from the “light work” that children are meant to do. If work is considered dangerous or if it would stop a child from going to school, we said that this was not ok and is not acceptable for a child to do.

The kids were very responsive and were good at choosing if the work was appropriate or not for a child. Afterwards we split the children into groups to analyze short scenarios and determine if the work was appropriate. I was very proud of the kids and they did a great job absorbing and analyzing the material. During the talk we also discuss some of the rights that every child has such as food, medical attention, education and so on. We made sure to tell the children that there were people that wanted to help them or their friends if they felt that their rights were being violated. Luckily, our head community volunteer in Nyanyano is a teacher at the school and is a wonderful person for children to go to with problems. It is exciting to know that there are so many good people in the community that understand the value of education and want to protect their children from exploitation.

Even though school has officially begun, not every school is running as smoothly as the one we visited in Nyanyano. The school that I will be teaching at also officially began on Monday, but only about nine students showed up. By Wednesday there were around 25 and hopefully next week we can start following the actually class schedule. While one of us was teaching all the various grades, the other teachers and director walked around the town reminding parents about school and asking why their children are not attending. It was a much different start than the past four years at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville.