Blogging on Meds

This kid looks stoked:

Maybe its because he’s 8 years old, works long hours in the Saharan heat, barely eats and he doesn’t even have to go to school…sounds like a kids dream! The Guardian has a good story today on child labor in Egypt; specifically the ones who work in cotton fields to keep production up for “high thread count Egyptian cotton.”

Nice:

Walking across the cotton farmers’ pathetic patch of land we find half a dozen children crawling on their knees through the undergrowth, like field mice. It is early in the growing season and their vital role is to remove tiny insects and worms that threaten the cotton plants. Standing waist-high in the cotton of an adjacent field, Ahmed Khaled casts nervous glances back towards his foreman. At 10 years old he is a ‘veteran’ of the fields. His day begins at 6am harvesting onions, a reliable year-round crop; the hardest part of the day comes when he enters the cotton fields, by 8am. ‘We work up to eight hours a day,’ he says. ‘This is the hardest time, keeping the cotton safe when the sun is at its hottest. The harvest is easier – the hours are hard but the weather is cooler.’ The youngster shows me his calloused hands, the dirt ingrained in his palm. ‘I cannot read or write,’ Ahmed says. ‘We go to school when we can, but we cannot afford to. School is for rich children.’

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