Child Labor

My Wife had to interview a couple of child laborers at Pasig City Market for a school project. She also took pictures and video of the children. Last night I had a chance to view the pictures and video she took as I was helping her do the editing. I nearly broke down to tears after watching the interview,  one of them was all alone by himself because his parents died and he had no close relatives nearby to look after him. There were 6 brothers and sisters forced to work by their father and were beaten up if they had no money when they got home from the market, and the list goes on. I pity the children because they had to work to earn a living while other children their age should be going to school and playing. Why are there people who pass their responsibility to their children?

Child labor is one of the many concerns in the Philippines and, most disturbingly, one of the most rampant problems we face. Every child has the right to the most basic of necessities in life like a healthy environment, formal education, and most importantly, a loving family to come home to. Yet, poverty hinders the child to any of these things and forces labor in farming fields, mining shafts and peddling in the busy and dangerous streets of the country. But even we have a responsibility too. Because while nobody is angered by their conditions or realizes the waste of a future that is being slowly squandered, they will remain in this world and they will cease to be children, and now we have Child Labor and Poverty that almost and always go together.

As my eyes are finally opened of this country's problem, my wife and I talked and agreed that at least every other weekend that we should go to Pasig City Market so that we can have our own little feeding program for them, and it's our own little way of helping the children. Although it's not much, but it's a start.

"Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time."