12-year-old Elyas misses school to arrange food for his family

HERAT CITY (Pajhwok): Elyas, 12, is busy collecting bottles or other worth selling items from the dump near Istiqlal High School and on the footpath of Cinema Square saying his father is sick and he had to do something to arrange food for him family.

The signs of burden of responsibilities and pressure could be clearly seen on his face. “I am 12 years old and arrange food for eight member family,” he said.

I want to go to school, but now it is a priority for me to collect soda cans and plastic bottles and to work for my family, Elyas added.

Elyas was busy collecting scrap near school and students were passing him to enter their school, he recalled his hopes: “I want to become a teacher in the future, but if I don’t study I will not be able to achieve my goal”.

He urged the government to facilitate education for all, so no child will remain illiterate in the society.

Nazir is another child laborer, he said: “I sell chewing gum to earn money and arrange food for my nine member family, my father is paralyzed and I am the only male of my family to work, the rest of my family is all females.”

Nazir along with his two younger sisters can sell two or three packets of chewing gum every day, he told Pajhwok Afghan News, he could make 90 afs daily for his family expenses.

Nazir is also misses school, he just thinks about how to win some food for his family, the money he makes every day can fulfill just a part of his family needs, he asked the government to help such people and pave the way for their studies, so they will not be thinking about the hard life of the winter.

The Labor and Social Affairs department of Herat province said, there were probably over 8,000 street children in Herat who are busy in hard labor jobs.

Mawlawi Hafiz Mirza Mohammad Abu Mansor, the head of Labor and Social Affairs department said, they had a plan to collect such street children, their family elders and provide them with vocational training so these children may not face difficulties in their future.

According to our plan, in cooperation with other institutions, we would like to collect 1,200 labor children from the streets during the next month to attend a program for their studies while their heirs will be employed and this program will be expanded more and more to cover the beggars as well, Abu Mansor said.

Civil society activists believe that increase in the number of street labor children would force a generation to deprive from education. Ghulam Hazrat Nabizada, a civil activist told Pajhwok Afghan News “Our society will suffer more losses when our children don’t go to school and deprived from education.

“There are 10,000 children in Herat province which make a big part of our society, if they remain illiterate, they cannot be normal people in the future” he said.

However there are no specific statistics about the number of street children in Afghanistan, but some officials said there are about 1.6 million such children in the country.

Some organizations active to protect the rights of the children, but the number of such less fortunate children was growing, increasing number of street children shows that apparently no significant progress has been made in this field.

It is worth mentioning, that as a result of harsh winter and cold weather more children were out in the streets and roads to earn something to arrange food for their families and this practice raised eyebrows.

Aw/nh