Working children: Living hand to mouth

Atif sells bananas in Aabpara to put himself through school.

ISLAMABAD: Every morning at 7 am, 13-year-old Waseem Khan and his 8-year-old brother Ibrahim come to Aabpara Market from Bari Imam to wash cars and earn money. Their mother is a domestic worker and their father a bedridden cancer patient. Waseem is the oldest of his brothers. “After my father’s illness, it became very difficult for my mother to run the house with only Rs1,500. So me and my brother were asked to go out and earn,” Waseem told The Express Tribune.

His youngest brother is five-years-old and stays home to look after the father and get food from a langar in Bari Imam. Waseem said, “We both start washing cars early in the morning and go back home at 8 pm at night. We hardly earn Rs100-200 daily out of which we have to pay transport fare of Rs60.”

He said due to limited earnings, they cannot afford to buy food from the market and get it from fruit vendors who give them discarded, rotten fruit.

“Sometimes restaurant owners give us leftover food,” he added. In other instances, the two brothers search dustbins outside the restaurants for something to eat.

November 20 is Universal Children’s day, but these children do not know that one day out of the year’s 365 has been dedicated to them.

Talking to The Express Tribune, Khurram Masood, media and communication advisor of Save The Children, said the only thing that can secure the future of children is the ‘Child Protection Act’ which is yet to be passed. “Without it the miseries of our children will keep on increasing,” he said.

Waseem wanted to be a teacher. “Now I want to be a public transport driver,” he said. Naseebullah is a 10-year-old resident of a slum near Khana Pul and collects papers, cigarette packs and other stuff that can be recycled from trash.

“Last year I was studying. But then my father asked me to leave my studies and join him,” he added.

Naseebullah earns Rs200-300 daily which he gives to his father to run the house. He has two sisters and two brothers who are studying. Being the eldest son, he was asked to support his family.

When asked what he wanted to become in the future, he said, “A doctor.”

Khairullah, 9, and Arfa, 11, come to Islamabad from a village near Shahdra to collect discarded fruit and vegetables from Sunday Bazaar in Aabpara. “We try to collect enough fruits and vegetables to cook throughout the week,” said Arfa.

Her father is a heart patient and cannot work. She said when there are no weekly bazaars she sells channas outside Bari Imam Shrine.  “I earn Rs50-100 daily which obviously is not enough for my family, but being a female I cannot do more than this,” she said.

Akif Saleem, 17, is a student of Intermediate degree college Rawalpindi. To pay his fees, he sells bananas on the footpath every Saturday.

“For the last six to seven years I have been doing this to pay my fees,” he said.

One of his elder brothers is a civil engineer and the other is an electronic engineer.

But they are not earning enough to bear Akif’s education expenses.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 21^st, 2010.