An open letter to my son
My darling baby boy,
This morning marks the second time in my life that I have had a life-altering moment while reading my morning news. Several years ago I sat in the bathroom of at my job and wept after seeing a teenage girl stoned to death by a mob in the streets for holding a boy’s hand, all captured by a cellphone camera and posted on CNN.com. Every major life choice I have made since that day has been informed by that morning. My wish for myself has been to live a life devoted to helping in whatever small way I can to promoting a better life for others. This morning, as I do every morning, I was following the rabbit trail of news links while you played in your crib and I found this article. About halfway through I had to stop reading it and hold you. The same emotions from that day years ago at my office washed over me in full force but this time with new and more personal meaning. I heard someone say recently that when you become a mother, you become a mother to every child in the world. If I weren’t a mother, if you didn’t exist, those would just seem like empty words. But in having you I cannot see any boy or girl suffering and not completely transpose your spirit, soul and my love for you on to them. To see another little one hurt is to see you hurt. You and I are so lucky. The biggest tragedies of my life, and I have had many, are a fraction of what most people experience. I will never know how lucky I am and all of the gifts chance gave me. As I look at you sleeping now I have to pray in a way I have never prayed before. I pray out of complete desperation and powerlessness. I pray from a place that even if I were a person who believed I were praying to nothing I would still have to pray because something bigger than ourselves is the only hope for your ultimate protection. Nothing makes you or I any different than the little boys and their mothers in Afghanistan. Nothing makes us any different than the families who have left their homes in other countries to find a better life somewhere else. Given the circumstance there isn’t a law I wouldn’t break to provide for a more peaceful life for you. Our circumstances now are arguably the best they have been for anyone in the history of the world and I am under no illusion that I have earned that status or that I am entitled to it. My prayer for you is that you will never experience the deep troubles of most of the world but more than that, I commit to working with you by my side to do little things to make our secure way of life the norm for more little boys and their mothers.
Love,
Mommy
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In case the link dies, here is the original transcript of article reposted from http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/26/kids_at_work_in_afghanistan?page=0,1:
Afghanistan’s Little Men
by Anna Badkhen - April 26, 2010
Before it dead-ends in a crowded burst of kiosks, pilgrims, and taxicabs at the northern gate of the Blue Mosque, Dasht-e-Shor Street is a motley procession of businesses that constellate by type.
First come the auto body shops, with gauges and hoses and pipes protruding from dark, sooty metal shipping containers. Then the welders, displaying heavy iron gates painted blue and green to ward off evil spirits. Then the bicycle dealers, decked out with rows of well-worn bikes and wheelbarrows (here the street is interrupted by a soccer field behind the wrecked wall of a bombed-out building); then a few small rice pilau and kebab stalls; and, finally, a long white-and-blue stretch of pharmacies.
Somewhere between the welders and the bike dealers, I buy a small box of pomegranate juice from Mahdi.
Mahdi is 11 years old. He has been running the soft drinks stall on Dasht-e-Shor for his uncle since he was seven. At first, the work was part-time, but after he graduated 4th grade he quit school to become a full-time street vendor.
Mahdi rolls up the metal blinds of the shop at 6:30 in the morning; he closes at seven or eight at night. The uncle is usually there to help open and lock up the store, but generally, Mahdi is on his own. How much does he earn for his work? I ask. Mahdi counts my change and juts out his chin in proud indignation.
“He is my uncle!” the boy says. “It would be totally embarrassing to take money from him.”
The child mortality rate in Afghanistan is second only to Sierra Leone’s. More than 2 million Afghan children are orphans. Children are also the casualties of the war over Afghanistan’s modernization: Last weekend, someone pumped poison gas into two schools for girls in Kunduz, poisoning scores of students.
Despite the billions of international aid dollars funneled into Afghanistan since 2001, the country is weighed down by crushing poverty — a burden that falls heavily on children. The United Nations estimates that one-third of Afghanistan’s children under 14 work. Drive out of any city in any direction, and you will see children as young as seven herding livestock, tilling fields, leveling dirt roads. Peek inside the shops of Dasht-e-Shor Street: Half of the workforce on this grimy boulevard appears to be children. There are child welders, child carpenters, child auto mechanics, child haulers of bags of cement, child shredders of carrots for someone else’s pilau.
There are no child pharmacists. A child cannot be trusted with something so delicate as medicine. Especially if he hasn’t finished elementary school.
Walk south on Dasht-e-Shor, toward the cyanic mosque thought to enshrine the remains of both Imam Ali and Zoroaster. Several blocks before the mosque, take a right on Mandawi Street, toward the main bazaar, and, if you are in the mood, pick up some cottage cheese from Hasan. He is the kid in the canary yellow T-shirt emblazoned with the words TOM AND JERRY and AIR HERO COME. He buys his cottage cheese from a wholesaler down the street and sells it at a very slight markup that will set you back a penny or two.
3 Comments
KristenYeah, I wasn’t really commenting directly on the merits of children working. But there is a huge diffrence between Upton Sinclair and a weekly paper route. Balance is always the best in everything but I find it insulting for anyone to assert that working in slums is benificial when they are doing so from the comfort of their central Texas home despite what thier study shows. Would he have his children grow up as the children he studied?
…and it really isn’t THAT counterintuitive. The net result is that they wanted to move here to get themselves into a better life and presumably a better life for their children. If this was truly a beneficial way of life then why wouldn’t these learned street kids want the same things for their children?
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My rant aside, thanks for posting a thought provoking sentiment and article, Gen. I appreciate it!
Not arguing with your point, or the point of this article. But, for an interesting counterpoint, you might want to check out Dr. Tom Offit’s research in Guatemala. He is a Baylor sociology prof who followed street kids for years. Long story short, he found that the kids forced to work on the street at a young age gained much better life skills than kids who stayed in the poor public school system, and that they were more likely to become successes in the community later on. Several even ended up immigrating to the US and doing ok here. Counterintuitive, but sometimes what seems like the worst choice among bad options can actually turn out ok. So, not that it makes these kids ok, but just know that sometimes things do work out in a positive and hopeful way.