I
Condemned to death
Child labor
The
setting is desolate and symbolic of this boy's situation; he is the sole
protagonist of the composition. The background is made up of a wall of
flaking stucco against which he is leaning and of another brick wall
which begins at the bottom left and rises almost to the point of
obscuring the patch of blue sky which still remains visible above. The
walls confine the boy's life within a circle of oppression, deprivation,
and pain. The child, in ragged clothes and barefoot, stares out beyond the painting with a look of sadness and emptiness. Beside him is a makeshift wheelbarrow: not a plaything, but a tool for his work, the instrument of his condemnation, the device which has robbed him of his childhood dreams and of his future. |
| A reflection by Brother Bernard Couvillion |
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In Lille, France, in April 1996, the group of seven industrialized nations focused international attention on the plight of child laborers. The International Labor Organization estimates that two hundred million children worldwide under the age of fifteen work for their living. Often
it is children who dip our matchsticks into phosphorus or mix the
gunpowder for our fireworks displays. Boys and girls who have never seen
a schoolroom draw molten glass from the furnaces to be formed into
bracelets and common glassware. Some are as young as 6. Aghan,
12, was recently rescued from a carpet factory by Save the Childhood Movement, an ngo
that raids factories employing children. He was kidnapped at 9
from his rural home and sold to a carpetmaker. “I was always crying
for my mother,” he told his rescuers. That didn’t please his boss,
who scarred his face with a heated knife and blinded his left eye with
acid. Aghan stopped crying, but he never stopped dreaming of being
able to write his parents to tell them what he was going through. “If
I could read and write, I would have told them ‘I am in hell.’” Asia accounts for more than 50 percent of the world’s child laborers. In the Philippines 4.5 million children work. In some African countries close to 50 percent of children under age fourteen work. In Brazil 34 percent of children between the ages of ten and fourteen are working, a total of 7 million, most of whom live in the streets. Spain has more than one hundred thousand child workers, generally on family farms. (Time April 15, 1996; The World & I February 1995) |
We give voice to the prayer of child laborers |
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Lamentations 5 Remember
o Lord what has befallen, look, and see our disgrace! We
have become orphans, fatherless; widowed are our mothers. The water we
drink we must buy, for our own wood we must pay. On our necks is the
yoke of those who drive us; we are worn out, but allowed no rest. Our
fathers, who sinned, are no more; but we bear their guilt. Slaves rule
over us; there is no one to rescue us from their hands. At the peril of
our lives we bring in our sustenance, in the face of the desert heat.
Youths carry millstones, boys stagger under their loads of wood. The joy of our hearts has ceased, our dance has turned into mourning. |