…for child trafficking. One of the biggest challenges faced in Togo is the fight against child labor and trafficking. The most common story of child trafficking heard in Togo goes like this: a man approaches a child and offers the him/her the opportunity to go to another country with the promises of getting rich and leaving the “boring” village life for something better, oftentimes to Nigeria. The kid agrees to go, under false pretenses, often without consulting their parents. When they arrive at “utopia” they find themselves working under horrible conditions for little or no money. The good news is that many of the kids do find their way back to their home in Togo, but unfortunately not without grave damage to their development, education, physical and mental health.
I work at a center for apprentices, as mentioned in the previous blog entry, where many of the apprentices are victims of child trafficking. The kids from the center are sometimes invited to Peace Corps’s Camp Unite (a week-long camp to train peer educators) to speak about their experience as a cautionary tale to others. The name of this blog post, “Ne va pas au Nigeria”, comes from the title of a song about child trafficking written by a previous Peace Corps volunteer in Sotouboua to raise awareness about the issue.
Child labor extends beyond Nigeria. Togo is an agricultural based society and farming corn, rice, millet and yams is sustenance and children are not excluded from working at the “champ” (fields). Now that school is out, many children are preoccupied with farming. But, when farming infringes on the child’s access to education it becomes an issue of concern and a violation of the child’s rights. I was recently asked by the director of the center for apprentices to speak to the female apprentices individually to gauge how they were feeling about their apprenticeship and their lives at the center. He was concerned for their wellbeing and felt that they would not be open with him about their feelings due to his gender. He asked me to focus my questioning around the forms of punishment inflicted upon the girls as well as the prevalence and type of manual labor they were assigned.
I discovered that corporal punishment is frequently used on the girls; those who are late to class receive a slap on the hands with a stick. Less serious offenses such as a sewing error warrant the collecting of gravel or staying late to finish an assignment. These forms of punishment are common in almost all schools and centers for apprentices in Togo, and this information didn’t really faze the director. What was of concern to the director is that the girls were being sent to the fields to farm up to three days a week on top of the scheduled Saturdays of manual labor to maintain the center. The girls admitted that they are habitually sent to both the patron’s and the patron’s friends’ fields to work many hours a day, with no compensation. Conversely, they are paying the center to be apprentices and learn the trade, not to be farmers. The girls often miss meals because they are in the fields and are often very exhausted from farming and have trouble focusing on their sewing lessons.
The director was enraged by this discovery, so we had a meeting with all of patrons to set new rules for the center. He proposed that the girls may only go to the fields to farm once a week, they may not be sent to the patron’s friend’s farms and that they should be somehow compensated. I spoke to the patrons on the importance of children’s rights and explained that the practices at the center were bordering on child slavery.
The campaign for children’s rights seems to be igniting throughout Togo and progress is being made to eradicate child labor throughout West Africa. I was recently watching my friend’s child, Ellie, practicing for the kindergarten school play. Ellie played a wife who was telling her husband to do some work around the house- to sweep the yard, to cook the dinner and take care of the kids, decidedly promoting gender equity. She then sang a song she’d be performing during the play:
“Je suis enfant et j’ai aussi mes droits” (I’m a child and I also have my rights)
I asked Ellie if she knew the significance of what she was singing. She pointed to her hand– she thought the words were:
“ Je suis enfant et j’ai aussi mes doigts” (I’m a child and I also have fingers!)
Luckily, Ellie is only four years old and just learning French so there is still time for the message to sink in before it’s too late!
