Spring Break
Child labor causes lower numbers at orphanage
Gone to Ghana
Kimberly Foli
Issue date: 4/17/08 Section: The Scene
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I walked around until I found the head Madame and I began asking her questions. She informed me that they sent home 35 children on a trial run with their parents.
A lot of the kids have families, but their families are either too poor or too lazy to take care of them. The owner and the head Madame of the orphanage decided to find out if the parents are now able to care for their children.
As soon as I found out about this trial run, I became very suspicious of the children being hired out to do domestic work for little, if any, pay.
My roommate, Cassandra, is Ghanaian and she is doing her senior thesis project on child domestic workers in Ghana. These children are either pushed onto the streets as hawkers or are kept in someone's house doing house chores for long hours.
The parents of these pint-sized domestic workers are typically too poor to feed their children. It is for this reason that they can justify "selling" off their children to work for other people.
Most of these children are promised some sort of apprenticeship when they are older in exchange for the under-paid work they do. Sometimes they even have their own children selling things on the street to make money for themselves.
All it takes is a quick ride down the road to see many of these children out on the streets carrying large baskets on their heads, filled with things to sell. "Puuuurewatah!" you hear them yelling as they walk along, skillfully balancing their baskets filled with water sachets.
You hand them five pesewas - they hand you a small bag of water, and then they move on to the next trotro.
This is child labor in its lowest, ugliest form. These kids are sacrificing childhood for survival. They are braving the intense sub-Saharan sun from 5 a.m. until well past dinner.
Little girls, 7 to 8 years old, have bigger muscles than I do. They run alongside the quickly moving, dangerous trotros, dodging other vehicles and putting their lives at risk on a day-to-day basis.
Meanwhile, children across America are comfortably planted in front of a television screen watching cartoons and playing with their toys. My suspicions proved to be correct.