People often ask me whether working on issues like human trafficking (especially child trafficking), child labour, abuse and exploitation and all forms of horrendous violence against children, young people and women doesn’t make me depressed. I have a long answer to that question, and it’s the intro to my very first blog. It’s all about anger!
The photo at the bottom of this blog was taken when I was on mission to Morocco in 2005. From the outset, I should say that the situation of children in Morocco is not particularly worse than many other countries I visit and, to be fair, the Moroccan Government has done much more than most governments do to try and reduce the numbers of children in child labour and at risk of other forms of exploitation. It’s not an easy task but Morocco now has a National Plan of Action for Children that is a pretty good start.
Back to the anger bit: I gave a talk last week at which, inevitably, someone asked me whether I don’t get depressed by working constantly on issues like trafficking, exploitation, abuse and violence. Since they knew that I do a lot of field work that involves actually meeting the victims of these heinous crimes, they wondered quite justifiably whether it didn’t “get at” me. The truth is that most of the time I am not so much depressed as angry. I don’t understand how people can treat other human beings, especially children, the way they do and still sleep at night. All they get out of it is money. Maybe a perverse pleasure. But this is not what being human is all about! You don’t have to be a Good Samaritan all the time. You don’t have to dedicate your life to helping others, if that’s not your thing. But surely we can all cope with the ‘do no harm’ principle at the very least?
I am glad that I still don’t understand how people can be so cruel and hateful. If I could, it would be time to give up. For now, I’ll live with the incomprehension and the anger – this latter gets me out of bed every morning and makes me want to continue making things different, even if in a very small way. Changing the world one person at a time.
At that talk last week, also, I shared with those present some examples of when the anger does coincide with real sadness. I call these stories the ‘children who broke my heart’ and, since one of them was in Morocco, I posted a picture of that trip for you to share.
But the child who broke my heart was a little girl. I met her when I was talking to a group of kids who had been removed from child labour and had just finished their first year in school. She exploded with frustration as I began to ask her questions. It turned out she had been turned away from school the previous day because she didn’t have the one dollar or so she needed to pay for insurance. The teacher told her not to come back until she had that dollar. Her mother didn’t have it, so she went to the carpet factory where she once worked and asked the supervisor if she could borrow one dollar until her subsidy from the project came. The supervisor told her, if she wanted a dollar, she would have to sit down and work for it. The girl said she couldn’t, she went to school now. And, as she talked to me, she lifted her neck and showed a line of dried blood where the supervisor had taken the scissors and run them across her neck, ear to ear, in response.
That line of blood and what it stood for violence, inhumanity, the hopes and aspirations of a little girl trying to live her life – broke my heart. And made me very, very angry. Stay angry.