Every thing that lives, lives not alone, nor for itself.William Blake

July 2014

  • A Bad Precedent

    Bolivia has passed a law lowering the legal age for children to work to 10. It was 14. The authors of the law say they are acknowledging a reality since many children below the age of 14 are already working. For the children who work, it’s a necessity. Those families would not survive without their labor. While child labor is fought against by human rights advocates, there are those who believe that the necessity trumps the principle. And while there’s truth to that argument, it’s also short sighted, because too often child labor perpetuates conditions of poverty. To the credit of the Bolivian law, it stipulates that working children must attend school. To work under contract children must be 12, and they too must attend school. A 2008 study found 850,000 children age 5-17 working in Bolivia, and nearly nine in 10 were in the worst kinds of jobs which include harvesting sugar cane and underground mining, which have been proven to shorten lives. The UN says that since 2000, child labor is down a third and that Latin America accounts for 13 of the 168 millions working children worldwide. If children under 14 were working illegally, why then not enforce the law rather than enact a new one, particularly since the present law is bound to be difficult to enforce—will children working as miners really be able to attend school? Maybe Latin America does not have as many working children as other continents, still this law sets a bad precedent.

  • Children, Holocaust And Responsibility

    Oyster Creek, Tex, Lawrenceville, Va and Murietta, Calif, are among the many localities that have strongly objected to having a shelter for the Central American children who need to be taken care of until their immigration status is clarified or they are deported. As past and future demonstrations remind us, possible locations in Connecticut, Iowa, North Carolina, New York along with several other states also have objected, some with extreme measures such as a demonstration complete with rifles. According to several reports including one by Sonia Nazario who has long studied the effects of illegal immigration on children, they are fleeing violence—usually from gangs—and most would be in harm’s way if they went back. I can’t help think that the more we take politics and ideology out of how we perceive this problem, the more we are able to see it as a humanitarian crisis, of minors trying to escape despair, poverty as well as violence. Maybe that’s why as I was reading about these shunned children, I remembered Holocaust survivors telling me about the instances of boats full of Jewish refugees who kept being denied access to port after port, until in at least one instance they went back to Germany where many of the passengers ended in concentration camps. I wasn’t surprised therefore when I read that Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, had the same idea when while speaking to the Boston Herald he made a comparison linking the children and the Holocaust. Yet, when asked by the White House if he could help with a location in his state, he did not say yes, but said he would be thinking through a practical solution. I was told by those same survivors that the Jewish refugees’ plight and fate eventually played a role in the establishment of the state of Israel, for many in the United States understood but too late that something had to be done. If Deval Patrick and I are correct and there is a link with what happened to Jewish refugees, then we need to ask ourselves, are we making the same mistake again? Will some of the children have to go back to harm and be killed in order for us to grasp our human responsibility?

  • Shining Through Strife

    Zaatari Refugee camp in Jordan, home to 85,000 Syrians, is the world’s largest camp, and may be on its way to setting an example for the aid community because it’s becoming a city! Well, not a city like New York or London, or even like any smaller one, but a city in the sense it is organizing itself like an urban center. To an outsider it may still look like a slum or a Rio’s favella, but to those living there, there is a sort of address system, a barbershop, a flower shop, a rotisserie take out, a travel agency… some even have washing machines and can buy homemade ice cream. Much of what they have comes from the black market and from smugglers. They do steal electricity, and the UN officials at the camp are thinking of charging a monthly fee, making some low income Jordanians living nearby envious. Of course like any urban environment they have crime. And because it is a refugee camp, residents can each tell horror stories of what they have had to live through before and after they left Syria. There’s another camp, Azraq, located in a desert like area far from anything. The refugees there fight despair, while those living in Zaatari are feeling hope—making the human spirit so evident in the camp all the more striking for shining through the strife.

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