The Lion's Pride Volume 11 (Winter 2019) | Page 22

Last summer, when I traveled back to my home country of Iran, I
met a boy who was sitting in a corner, tired and alone. He was very
hungry, so every so often he was looking at the biscuits that he brought
with him. He really wanted to eat one of the biscuits, but could not,
because he had to sell them to earn money for his family. The mother
and his little sister, as well as the sick father, waited for him to take
some money back home to have something for dinner. I sat down and
talked with him. I asked him how old he was, and he said he was seven
years old. I asked why, instead of being in school or playing with his
friends, he was sitting here and waiting for people to buy biscuits from
him. He replied that he must earn money for his family, his dad is sick,
and his mother cleans up people’s houses and makes them food, and she
earns very little money for all this work. Therefore, he had to work to
help his mother. He wished to be a doctor and treat his father for free, so
his father would be able to work. He wanted to be very rich, so his
mother would not have to work in people’s houses. And another of his
wishes was to become rich enough to buy a doll for his three-year-old
sister. These small wishes were the greatest wishes of this child laborer.
This experience raised so many questions in my mind: Who are these
child laborers? What future do these child laborers have? What is the
statistic of child laborers? And also, what are the conditions of child
labor in the world and in Iran? In this essay, I will share what I have
learned through researching the problem of child labor. I will argue that