Child Labor

Children have of course been used as a source of labor for time immemorial. Whether helping with the harvest or performing more domestic chores, they act as a pair of hands that eases the burden on the adults of a household, whose responsibilities are multiplied by the existence of the children. Even today, to watch a boy herding sheep does not spark outrage, and such work does not seem a crime to their youth and innocence.

But seeing children work in more commercial settings–on streets, in stores or in factories–this brings out a sense of pity. Sad to report, we found many instances of child labor in Syria, some more objectionable than others. What we saw here is not the horrific, industrialized abuse that one imagines when hearing similar reports in other parts of the developing world (although in all our travels in Asia we have almost never witnessed such use of child labor), but smaller scale. To our eyes and hearts, however, each such sight was still a depressing and at times even shocking encounter.

As night falls. This small child was selling sweets on an overpass outside of the old city of Damascus.

We found these three boys in a small candy/sweets factory. Of the fifteen or so employees, most were boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen or so, giving the whole place a Willy Wonka feel. The youngest ones are separating out little paper cups that are used for packaging.

This young cobbler was working in a shoe workshop with two adults. I suppose he may have been one of their sons (or perhaps a nephew), but the somewhat grim basement setting, along with the assembly-line nature of the work, left us uneasy. [Given the medieval setting of Aleppo, it’s not hard to think of some of the child labor as apprenticeships. In medieval Bukhara, Uzbekistan, we ran into a small furniture workshop staffed with young men/boys described as a woodworking school and in Cambodia and South India, we have seen crafts for sale made by “young art students.”]

Ferrying goods into a khan, or caravanserai.

On a lighter note–kids helping tend the shops of their parents. Part child labor, part cheap daycare. (I sometimes helped my parents as a young boy, though certainly not as a regular “job.”) We frequently saw the boy juicer minding the shop alone; the boy grocer looked more like he was visiting after school. It was cute, I must admit, when little children would ask us what we needed, trying to explain the price of the merchandise.