School is optional in the under-developed world, and nowhere is this more true than Afghanistan. In a coun­try where dras­tic steps must be taken to put food on the table, many chil­dren work to help feed their sib­lings or par­ents. Some­times the small pay of the par­ents is not enough, so some of the boys of the fam­ily will have to work instead of attend­ing classes.

From the Tele­graph UK, writer Phil Hazle­wood pro­files one such family.

“We came here to earn money,” said Chaman Gul, lean­ing on the han­dle of a shovel in a pile of wet sand at the Gahiz brick fac­tory, which makes 42,000 bricks every day for build­ing sites from Kabul to Bamiyan.

“My five sons are here and I have four daugh­ters at home in the village.”

Chaman is 36 but looks two decades older. Four of his sons — Omar, 15, Amin, 13, Taza, 12, and 10-year-old Anam — squat nearby, look­ing up occa­sion­ally as they fill cast-iron brick moulds.

His fifth, Stana, 18, is busy else­where on the site.

The chil­dren, whose small foot­prints are left in the pow­dery dust amid tyre and hoof marks, are not play­ing though.

They are work­ing and Chaman’s youngest son — four years below the min­i­mum work­ing age in Afghanistan — is by no means an exception.

Else­where in Kabul, other school-age chil­dren can be seen in grimy work­shops, push­ing wheel­bar­rows, strug­gling with heavy sacks or, unseen behind the walls of hous­ing com­pounds, weav­ing car­pets by hand on large metal looms.

UNICEF said in 2007 that a quar­ter of Afghan chil­dren aged between seven and 14 worked, despite legal and con­sti­tu­tional pro­tec­tion and Afghanistan being a sig­na­tory to the UN Con­ven­tion on the Rights of the Child.

The Afghanistan Inde­pen­dent Human Rights Com­mis­sion (AIHRC) esti­mates that 60,000 chil­dren are cur­rently work­ing in Kabul alone.
…

At the brick fac­to­ries, chil­dren spend their days in the chok­ing air of dust and acrid char­coal smoke from the kilns, stack­ing and sort­ing rec­tan­gles of wet bricks laid out to dry in long rows.

Poverty, infla­tion and the human cost of war — death or dis­abil­ity among par­ents — mean they must work to feed their fam­i­lies, said Nadery.

Even when par­ents do have jobs, and free gov­ern­ment schools exist, atten­dance is often depen­dent on whether a fam­ily can afford pens and paper, he added.

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