Children Breadwinners Face Harsh Daily Gring
The Frontier Post
2/22/02

KABUL (Agencies): School has finished for the day but Hamid can’t go home until he has some money in his pocket. The 12-year-old afghan boy is his
family’s breadwinner and he needs to make at least 10,000 Afghanis, about 30 U.S. cents, before it gets dark.

“Every day it’s the same,” said the delicate, brown-eyed boy who looks three or four years younger than he is. “I have to get something, I can’t go home with nothing.” Hamid is one of thousands of children in the afghan capital, often orphans, who must beg, scavenge, collect firewood or shine shoes if they and their families are to survive, Reuters reported.

They have holes in their dirty second-hand clothes, shoes that don’t fit and little or nothing warm to protect them against the bitter afghan winter. It is not clear how many children work on the streets of Kabul. The last survey, in 1996, found 28,000.

Shamin Mohammad, deputy director of Aschiana, a center for working children, says he thinks that figure has now doubled. “We are full to the ceiling,”
he said. “There are so many children we can’t take them all. We don’t have the funds or the space.” Aschiana gives nearly 1,500 children half a day of
classes and two hot meals a day. Half of the children are girls, allowed back to the center in November after being banned by the former Taleban regime from receiving any kind of education.

Some children come in the morning, some in the afternoon. “I am a beggar,” said 11-year-old Nadia. "In the morning I work. Then I wash my hands and face and come here.” Most of the children in the center have lost one or both their parents to war or illness.

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