 There are 218 million child laborers in the world today. In Ecuador I saw life through their eyes.
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I made two new friends this week during a trip to South America. The first boy’s name is Levin. He was sleeping on a sidewalk near a shopping mall in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, when I turned a corner and saw his frail body curled up against a wall.
The people traveling with me, four ministers from Peru and El Salvador, all stopped when I knelt down and gently shook the boy. He was holding a bulging plastic bag of chewing gum as if it were a teddy bear. Inside the bag I could see a few dollar bills and some coins.
Levin was literally asleep on the job.
“Child labor is the most insidious cause of poverty today—because the children are pulled from school and grow up to be ignorant.”
“Mi amigo,” I said, lifting his head off the concrete. He opened his tired eyes, wiped his dirty face and looked around, avoiding direct eye contact. He was afraid.
In my broken Spanish I asked him if he wanted something to eat. He nodded, clutching his bag of gum close to his skinny body. I grabbed his hand, pulled him to his feet and patted down his unkempt black hair.
We began to walk to the mall when another boy, about a foot shorter than Levin, suddenly appeared from behind a wall. He was carrying a similar plastic bag of Chicklets. My friend Milagros, a pastor from Lima, Peru, asked him a few questions in Spanish and learned that he was Levin’s younger brother. His name is Freddy, and he is six. Both boys are street vendors.
“¿Tienes hambre? (Are you hungry?),” I asked Freddy. “Sí,” he said with a faint smile. The brothers looked malnourished. I wondered if their mother had given them anything for breakfast that morning. Then I wondered if their mother was even alive.
I took Freddy’s hand and walked toward the mall entrance while a Salvadoran youth pastor, Janny, held onto Levin. When we got to the door a security guard eyed the boys with suspicion as if he had seen them before.
Janny told the guard that the boys were our guests. He smiled curiously and allowed us to enter the mall. We walked straight to the food court, where everything from pizza to hamburgers to Ecuadorian ceviche was available.
I asked the boys what they liked to eat. Without hesitation Levin said he wanted Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) with arroz con menestra. I knew arroz was rice, but neither Janny nor I had heard of menestra. We soon discovered it was a uniquely Ecuadorian dish of rice with lentils. I walked over to the KFC counter and ordered two big plates for the boys.
When I brought the tray of hot food to the table, Freddy quickly grabbed two packets of mayonnaise and squeezed the stuff all over his rice, squirting some of it across the table on his brother. Levin didn’t laugh at Freddy’s antics. Both boys ate hurriedly until they had finished almost every bite.
“Dónde está su madre?” (Where is your mother?) I asked. Levin said something about her working. But Janny told me that when she asked him the same question while I was at the counter, he told her his mother had died. We weren’t sure which story was true.
Levin also told us he was worried because someone had stolen $10 from him, and his father might get mad about it. Janny told him we were not going to give him money, only food. “These children make up a lot of stories,” she told me, knowing that the boys could not understand her English.
As they finished their lunch we told the boys that Jesus loves them. I patted Freddy’s head and prayed that he would know the love of the Savior. And then we sent them on their way. Each had a bag of uneaten chicken in one arm and their inventory of chewing gum in the other.
I could hardly fathom the fact that these two kids were on their own, with no one to protect them from thieves, reckless drivers and the unscrupulous men who exploit children to sell candy on the streets. The sad truth is there are an estimated 218 million children in the world today who are classified as child laborers.
Child labor is the most insidious cause of poverty today—because the children are pulled from school and grow up to be ignorant. Seventy percent of them work in agriculture, but others do extremely hazardous work in mines, factories, brick kilns and construction sites. Millions of girls are forced to stay home to serve as domestic workers. And millions of girls and boys are sexually exploited, working as prostitutes or used to create pornography.
What can we do? I felt helpless in Guayaquil because feeding Levin and Freddy a hot meal won’t get them back in school. But I came home on Monday knowing that the church must cry out until these little ones are off the streets.
We must pressure foreign governments to outlaw child labor, fight child sexual exploitation and use the abundant resources of the American church to support Christian ministries that are feeding and educating the Levins and Freddys of the world.
Many of these kids are curled up on a sidewalk somewhere right now, overwhelmed by pressures that no 8-year-old should have to face. Please don’t ignore them.
J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma. Reprinted with permission from Charisma & Christian Life, April 9, 2008. Copyright Strang Communications Co., USA. All rights reserved. www.charismamag.com
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