Sarah Boseley - The children working the tobacco fields: 'I wanted to be a nurse'
Tiyamike Phiri is 14,
with the long skinny legs of a girl entering adolescence. In another world, she
would be with friends in the school playground. Instead, she is bent double at
the hips, gouging out weeds from the earth under a savage sun between banked
rows of tobacco plants using a heavy hoe, made of a tree branch and a metal
plate.
She looks up in some
wonderment, unused to questioning such a life for a child. She is not unusual.
There are 18 tenant families on this tobacco farm in the Kasungu district of
Malawi, each living in a straw hut. Only two of the other girls go to school,
she says. Two-year-old Jackson Phiri stumbles past. He has a miniature hoe,
fashioned by his father, Lazaro, because he cried every time he saw his mother
and father set off for the fields carrying tools and wanted one for himself.
There seems an inevitability about the lives of these children.
“I left school last
year because I had no school materials,” said Tiyamike, her eyes on the ground
and her voice quiet. “I liked school. I liked Chichewe [her language] best. I
got very good grades. But my main problem was I had no exercise books and
nothing to write with.” Without a pen and an
exercise book, she could not do schoolwork, her teachers pointed out. But she
lives with her older brother and his wife and baby and they have nothing. “I
help them in the fields,” she said. She would go back if
she could. “I would like to do nursing,” she said. Instead, she weeds, builds
earth banks for the tobacco plants and sews the harvested leaves together to
suspend them from branches so they dry in the air. Weeding is the worst. “It is
a hard job,” she said.
Tiyamike is just one
of many children in Malawi who see little future beyond the tobacco
fields.
A report in 2011
estimated there were 1.3 million worldwide under the age of 14. The figures are
hard to come by, but the International Labour Organization last year reported
that child labour was on the increase, in spite of the
tobacco companies’ protestations that they are working to end it.
“Child labour is rampant,” the report said. Research conducted in
Malawi revealed that 57% of all children in two tobacco producing districts
were involved in child labour; among tobacco growing families, 63% of children
were engaged in child labour... read more:
