Imagine the world upside down. Imagine tomorrow, 8am. You’re getting your son or daughter ready for school. All of a sudden you notice that your child isn’t carrying a schoolbag; he or she is carrying a pickaxe and shovel. Not toy ones for the beach – real ones, heavy ones that will give their fingers blisters.
When you’re about to help them cross the road you see the track lines on their hands from hours working in the sun. You can’t believe it when you hear “I’m going to work” come out of your child’s mouth, with that authoritative tone 10-year-olds have when they’re used to bringing home the daily bread. “This is the other side of the looking glass,” you muse, disconcerted.
The other side, depending on which side you're on. To Juan Huachaca, a 10-year-old Peruvian boy who works making bricks in Huachipa, a town on the outskirts of Lima, there is nothing strange about it. Not to him or to the 215 million other boys and girls around the world who go to work every morning, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO).
I’m on my way to the pampas where Juan makes bricks. It’s a thirsty-looking place, and you could say Huachipa is as flat as an open hand but, suddenly, a deep wound hollows out the land and turns it into a huge brick plain.
“This is where I live, this is where I work,” Juan says with a tired voice as he incessantly kneads with his bare feet a mixture of clay and water scratched over the ground.
Juan lives with his family in an adobe tin-plate house, with mats for flooring and just one bed to share. The house is warmed by a tiny kerosene heater; cheerful melodies in the background at times lift the sordid sadness of poverty. Juan’s hair is black and straight and hangs over his eyes. Every morning he works the land with his parents and siblings in those huge wounds in the ground.
In Huachipa, the other side of the looking glass, there are no farms, but that does not prevent 85 per cent of its children from “working the land”, which is how they describe traditional brick manufacturing. Juan’s ancestors really had worked the land with their crops. They sowed corn, potatoes and cotton. The Huaycoloro river even ran through here. Now it is a wasteland where a few trees barely cling to life beneath a dry sky always empty of birds and clouds. The only thing growing is the mud that will become the bricks.
Juan gets up at 3am and starts work at 4am, when the world outside is still lit by the moon and the air is still cold as steel. It is time for Juan and his father, Miguel Huachaca (39), to prepare the clay with the soil stolen from the plain and the water sucked out of a well. It is something they have to do at night because the blaze of the sun would dry out the mixture.
Later, Juan will go for hours close to silence, hauling the mud in a repetitive mechanical task. Between grunts he will put the wet substance in a gavera, a kind of mould for four bricks, which will form each piece. He will pick up a stick and shave off the extra clay. Then he will tip over the 30lb mould. After that, it is the sun's turn to work, drying out the last drop of sweat from the thousands of bricks laid out on the pampas.
Structural poverty
Working is normal in Peru for more than two million boys and girls aged five to 17, or 28 per cent of the total Peruvian population under 18. Peru has the second-highest child labour rate in Latin America, after Brazil. According to the ILO, there are several reasons for child labour, but all of them have to do with structural poverty from precarious jobs and the difficulties faced by many families to make ends meet. That's why children work. Because a child's wage is another half-gallon of milk for today or two pounds of rice for the week, or it means being able to pay for a gallon of kerosene at the end of the month.
The globalisation of the economy has meant that many farmers are no longer able to sell their crops in the local market. Since the free-trade agreement between the US and Peru came into effect in 2009, the US administration subsidises its farmers’ production to such an extent that corn “made in the US” is cheaper for Peruvian consumers to buy than the corn that has been farmed for thousands of years in the Andes.
Juan’s family keeps “working the land” but now to grow bricks instead of corn. Developers pay them 32 soles (about €10) to “harvest” 1,000 pieces a day. If they don’t hit that number, they don’t get paid, which means everyone in the family has to help, even the smallest ones, aged three and five. At 10, Juan already knows his work is a major contributor to helping his family survive. But he says his hands are “always cracked”. “I don’t like anyone seeing them because they’re all calloused. I’ve got callouses here, here and here,” he whispers, showing me the insides of his hands.
When the clock strikes 8am, Juan has already been working for hours in the holes in the ground. It’s time for school, although he doesn’t always go. When he does go, he only stays until noon. After an insubstantial snack, he goes back to the bricks from 2pm to 5pm. That’s a total of seven hours’ working and, when he goes, four hours at school.
From 2000 to 2008 the ILO’s programmes were able to reduce the number of child labourers by 20 million, but since the global financial crisis the figures have started to rise again. The ILO expects that by 2020 there will still be almost 190 million children working.
In Huachipa, the Life Defence Association (Adevi in Spanish) has been able to convince some families; every year 100 children stop working and dedicate their time to going to school regularly.
Sometimes tolerated
Some NGOs tolerate child labour if it does not affect the child's development, underlining why they are forced to work. Manthoc, a Peruvian organisation that represents more than 2,500 working children, says "work is bad when it is carried out in conditions of exploitation, with abuse, and violating our dignity as human beings". It does not believe it makes sense to forbid child labour when the socio-economic system itself jettisons children into poverty, forcing them to work to subsist.
“My dad showed me how to haul bricks when I was six,” says Juan, reminiscing about the beginnings of his trade. “In the beginning I only worked a little bit, but when I got used to it I could do more and more.”
The first day he went to work he was excited, filled with the childlike sensation of growing up all at once. But his childhood never came back.
Working the bricks is a job that benefits from a child’s qualities, such as lightness and agility. Qualities that make turning the bricks upside down to dry on the other side easy for them. Hiring a child is also “advantageous” for the businessman: it is assumed they will be paid less than an adult; they don’t usually know their rights; they’re more docile; and they rarely join unions. Children, it would seem, are clay that can be moulded to the employer’s liking.
Deformities and injuries
The "advantages" for the children are also apparent: bone deformities, muscle problems from repetitive movements, blistered hands, foot injuries, and so on.
Adevi director Alfredo Robles says these children are usually also “much shorter than others in their age group. They also tend to be withdrawn since they’re forced into responsibilities as they grow up.”
On Sunday, the day of rest, the children spend it playing football. Juan likes being the goalkeeper. “The goalie has to block the ball,” he says excitedly before the game. “If you don’t see the ball they can score a goal. I keep my eye on the ball and I block it.”
The dogs and chickens haven’t even got off the field when the game starts. Juan plays barefoot and uses a pair of old runners as gloves. He puts the ball into play, kicking it with the tip of his foot. But minutes later he is screaming in pain: his big toe is bleeding because he broke a nail.
“Put your shoes on your feet!” I shout over to him.
His answer surprises me. “They’re too small for me. My feet are bigger than they are,” he says, adding: “Anyway, this way I don’t hurt my hands blocking the ball.”
For these families, economic hardship becomes a vicious circle that repeats with every generation since work means minors have to stop going to school. That means when they’re older they can only get precarious jobs. And then their children will also have to start working when they’re young.
A cycle of poverty and exclusion can define a country’s development. “Any child who cannot completely develop up to the necessary capacities will be unable to contribute as an adult to society and the economy will be affected,” says Kevin Cassidy of the ILO.
The mud in the brick fields will be turned into bricks that will then become part of a building on one of Lima’s avenues. But in Huachipa’s upside-down world, the children aren’t the bricks to build a future society.
Only rain could sweeten the air’s dryness but it doesn’t look like that will happen today because the sky is endless.
“What do you do with the bricks once they’re dry?” I ask Juan.
He glances at his father, who can barely work because he has a broken arm. He looks at me with distrust but answers: “It doesn’t totally dry here. The trucks come and take it to the ovens.”
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I ask Juan.
“I want to be a truck mechanic when I grow up and not keep filling [the brick moulds with clay] because it’s messing up my hands and I’m getting scars,” he says, pursing his lips too late to prevent a tear falling from his eye.
Juan’s dreams and abilities are the same as every child’s. The only difference is that he was born into poverty. His childhood, like that of all child labourers, is fragile, easy to destroy.
Now imagine Juan wrapped in a blanket on the couch in the living room. Your living room, not his. Juan’s house doesn’t have a living room, much less a couch. Imagine the remote control in one of his cracked and splintered hands. Imagine him in puddles – this time not preparing the clay mass but jumping in and out, splashing. Imagine Juan in your neighbourhood. Imagine him running and dancing in the wind – this time not to taste the dryness of the bricks but to enjoy from start to finish those days where sadness has no place.
Yes, I know. I know a kid from Huachipa plopped down in your own living room, just like that, and seen from this side of the world he seems like a kid upside down. And, believe me, Juan is. At his age, his hands are already streaked with time. Juan is an adult in a child’s body. He’s a kid from the other side.
