Will this ever change?
Will you ever understand what I really want?
Can you look through my eyes, see and feel what I go through when I work 12-14hrs a day without even going to toilet?
Do I want to go to school?
Do I want to be with my family?
Do I love going to work?
Do I like living on the street?
Do I love the city life, the freedom that I get, the drugs that I take, the time I spent on footpath?
Do I want to go back home?
Do I want to learn a skill to get a good job?
I really DO NOT KNOW!!!
But I also don’t know why you are asking me all these questions?
Why can’t you just let me BE!!
I will talk when I WANT TO…not when I am ASKED TO…
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Wrote this one during the workshop I recently attended on child labour. Somewhere felt that the most urgent need of an hour is to look into the eyes of these children, listen to them and let them BE!! Due to our constant guilt and ambition of making the world a better place for children, we fail to realize that we are simply experimenting with them. Be it...rescuing them from work and dumping into the Govt. home or into an NGO shelter or send them back home.
We are in so much hurry to make things RIGHT that as soon as we see any child alone, our immediate reaction is - Let's get him to some place safe...the assumption being the place where he is right now is not SAFE and he is not HAPPY being just there!!
At the beginning of this journey that I have undertaken to resolve the issue of Child Labour, I am facing a moral question - Who am I to decide that the child is better off with his family or at shelter and not when he is working at a Zari factory? How can I decide that education is ONE solution for all the children and that every child should not work but go to school?
Who am I to decide? ?
I am trying as hard as I can to remind myself every time that in this journey, I should not take actions to do what I feel is right, but my first responsibility is to listen to these children and give them the space they require...for may be all they need is TIME!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wrote this one during the workshop I recently attended on child labour. Somewhere felt that the most urgent need of an hour is to look into the eyes of these children, listen to them and let them BE!! Due to our constant guilt and ambition of making the world a better place for children, we fail to realize that we are simply experimenting with them. Be it...rescuing them from work and dumping into the Govt. home or into an NGO shelter or send them back home.
We are in so much hurry to make things RIGHT that as soon as we see any child alone, our immediate reaction is - Let's get him to some place safe...the assumption being the place where he is right now is not SAFE and he is not HAPPY being just there!!
At the beginning of this journey that I have undertaken to resolve the issue of Child Labour, I am facing a moral question - Who am I to decide that the child is better off with his family or at shelter and not when he is working at a Zari factory? How can I decide that education is ONE solution for all the children and that every child should not work but go to school?
Who am I to decide? ?
I am trying as hard as I can to remind myself every time that in this journey, I should not take actions to do what I feel is right, but my first responsibility is to listen to these children and give them the space they require...for may be all they need is TIME!
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