Children of Conflict: Afghanistan
In the crowded city of Kabul there is a growing population of about six million children who dropped out of school to work and support their families. These children over work themselves every day to earn 10 cents per plastic bag, running between cars after pedestrians. Girls disguise themselves as boys so they would be able to go and sell plastic bags and earn a few Afghanis to get some bread to feed the family. The United Nations estimated that there are about fifty-thousand street children in Kabul alone. Most of those street children can’t afford an education because their fathers are unemployed or died in one of the wars (Haidary).
Data has shown that in 2002 there were thirty-eight thousand street children but now that number is estimated to sixty-thousand. There are many different reasons why this massive increase happened. There were many refugees from Iran and Pakistan that were forced out of their homes. Also, fathers would either get injured or die in the war. Therefore, the orphaned children have no choice but to help support their families. The children found many other ways of earning money besides selling plastic bags. They learned how to repair bikes, work for shoe-makers or ask for alms to get the waft aromatic smoke made to ward off the devil at people passing by (Haidary).
Kabul has many unemployed individuals that live in poverty, most are refugees of wars. Afghanistan is known to be one of the poorest countries with forty million residents who are living below the poverty line. However, after the US invasion, the number of street children has decreased and they started going to school fulltime. Based on The Education Ministry’s data, seven million children were registere...
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...thunger.org/countries/asia/afghanistan?gclid=CKCko8Xn4L0CFecWMgodzGwAAA>. >.
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poor”( Papalia et al. 295). Thousands of children around the United States sit on street corners
In the early 1990s, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) of Sierra Leone, led by former military agents invaded Sierra Leone from Liberia. The RUF initially said they were leading a political movement. Their main goals were to promote liberation, democracy, and freedom. They said they wanted justice and equality for all civilians living in Sierra Leone. In spite of what the RUF said they were doing, they were forceful and left trails of murder in their path. When civilians lacked support for the “political revolution”, the RUF started a decade long war that ravaged the country as a whole. The RUF developed a sense of structured, militarized violence. It created a climate of opportunities for average civilians to obtain cheap weapons. With the greater access to weapons for civilians and the RUF, the politics became more militarized also. As the war waged on, poverty rose and people began to resort to looting of national resources. Laws diminished and seemed to lack any strength against the brute force of the RUF and their civilian followers (Denov, 2010).
Afghanistan since its beginning has been a place of conflict, despair, and at times lost hope. It has been taken advantage of and lost its sense of identity, which has had a direct effect on its people, and there own sense of what justice truly is.
If you walk into a classroom full of kindergarteners and ask them what they want to be, you won’t hear words like “gangbanger” or “drug dealer.” You will hear big aspirations like “doctor.” “Astronaut.” “Artist.” The dreams of children are powerful, but in places like the project where Lafeyette and Pharoah are growing up, those dreams die early on. Their families are caught in the clutches of generational poverty without any clear path out. They lack exposure to many of the strategies that people in other parts of the world have to manage their own lives. Because they are constantly moving from one crisis to the next, these children truly never have the chance to enjoy being small and young. They don’t have the kind of protection in place that they deserve to have, and that distorts their progression toward adulthood. They get used to living in constant fear and stress, and they think that life will always be that way. Unfortunately, too many of these lives end before the children even have the chance to move out of the apartment where they have been crammed along with all of their siblings, a parent (not two in so many cases) and perhaps even a grandparent and other family members. Instead, they die too young from the ongoing epidemic of violence. These are children who never have a real chance to succeed. This is
Many children in these Third World countries have no other option but to go to work and help support their families. Otherwise they are left to survive for themselves on the streets ruled by crime and danger. Cathy Young strengthens this point by saying, “Some children, left with no other means of earning a living, may even be forced into prostitution.” Yes, to most people, working in a sweat shop does not seem like a good option but for some it is the only one so why get rid of it.
Nevertheless, negotiating the children’s health and learning to help their families out of debt or to nourish their siblings is too high a value to pay in my belief. According to Bhakti Varma (2011), children taking occupations in sweatshops produce a cycle which must be destroyed. The malicious sequence begins when circumstances force children to work which almost unescapably leads to very little chance of them ever being able to create a superior life for themselves. When they start labor young they commonly obtain very little or no education; as they grow up, they remain unschooled and have their offspring young. With no learning or skills, they are lucky to be able to keep their low paying and frequently depressed and hazardous jobs. However, that is not constantly the case; most frequently older grownups lose their occupation to younger workers. Lingering in a low paying job or being jobless makes it hard to have enough money to feed and lead the children to school. Consequently, the children are forced to become child laborers themselves and carry on the
With the arrival of the Taliban the social and more importantly the economical problems for the women of Afghan has increased. These women live their lives under monstrous oppression of both Jehadi and Taliban fundamentalists in disastrous situations, most of the Afghan women’s basic human rights are denied to them. By the rule of the Taliban, women are denied the right to have a job, this ruling that has created a flood of unemployed women in Kabul. These women that are unemployed now face very serious financial difficulties, suffering along side them are their children. Together that suffer from malnutrition, hunger many forms of illnesses as well as living that a chronic state of poverty. Majority of these women have lost their husbands and have sold the last of their valuable possessions in order to buy food. The women that were fortunate to be able to afford to leave the country and build a new life outside of Afghanistan have long go from the scene. The women that could not afford to leave have become the bulk of beggars in their country. Surprisingly the majority of the street beggars are ex teachers and civil servants.
There are about 3.5 million people in America alone that are homeless; half of these people are children between the ages of 10-17. Neglect, Physical, and Sexual abuse are some reasons most teens are on the streets. 20% of children every year are experiencing physical and emotional neglect by their parents, families, and best friends. They feel as if their not appreciated, wanted, or even loved. Most teens feel like they would be better without their parents and decide to run away. The crime rates are outrageous on the street! As a result, 5000 teens die every year due to high risk anxiety, depressions, post traumatic stress, and disorders. The growth of homelessness was increasing 8.5% per month each year. Causing the Government to loose over 4 million dollars. Lots of teens are often beaten and raped everyday. The majority are female. 96% of females on the streets are often fatherless and easily taken advantage of by older and younger men. Because they are fatherless, they don’t know how to be treated, and allow men to beat and have unconsensual sex with them. For awhile these teen girls feel like these men are doing this out of love and care, until the beatings and forced relations get WORSE! When these teens find a way to escape from their abusive relationships, they find themselves on the street selling their bodies for survival. Studies show that 3 out of 4 female teens under the age of 15 are forced into prostitution while living on the streets. These teens deal with the risk of kidnapping, Aids and STDs. According to the justice system of missing persons, 1 out of 4 teens are abducted everyday trying to steal, trespass, and sell their bodies. Living on the streets and catching viruses and Aids is commonly fo...
Canada has played a vital role in international relations for the majority of its 144 year history since the signing of Confederation in 1867. Canada first participated in World War I, then World War II in 1939-1945. Following World War II, Canada was also involved in the Korean War. Canada has been primarily a peacekeeping nation. There are many questions people ask when a high income country goes to help a lower income nation such as Afghanistan. What are Canada’s motives for helping out Afghanistan? Who will benefit from Canada going to war in Afghanistan? These are some of the questions many people have. While Canada has many domestic problems of its own such as homelessness, poverty and increasing national debt, why should Canada get involved with a problem that is across the globe? Are the costs of going to war out weight the political benefits? Modernity, modernization theory and gender stratification are some key concepts that are related to Canada going to war in Afghanistan.
Poverty in Afghanistan has been an issue since 1979. Thirty-six percent of the population deals with the lack of clean water, food and shelter. In the novel, The Kite Runner, there were many citizens who also dealt with this. A large amount of individuals had taken extreme measures in order to make money and feed their families. For example, ''He's selling his leg?'' ''You can get good money for it on the black market. Feed your kids for a couple of weeks.'' (271-271). This indicates the extremely high level of poverty as individuals feel the only thing left to do is practically sell their own body parts on the streets. There are numerous homeless citizens that want a place to stay however are forced to stay on the streets due to Kabul not having any shelter homes. ''Rubble and beggars. Everywhere I looked, that was what I saw. ...They squatted at every street corner, dressed in shredded burlap rags, mud-caked hands held out for a coin. And the beggars were mostly children now, thin and grim-faced, some no older than five or six.'' (257). This shows the lack of community centers as conditions only get worse. Children under the age of ten are now on the streets begging for money. This is very inappropriate as the children can be easily kidnapped or misused. However, civilians and their families do not have a another way of surviving. Nonetheless, conditions in
Afghanistan is a country in war and a country in devastation. Afghanistan has one of the world’s highest infant mortality rates and the world’s highest birth rates. Because of the high infant mortality rates, they also have many problems in health, sanitation, and a lack of food they have. Because of poor health and sanitation in the country of Afghanistan, the Afghanis have many sicknesses and diseases. Sickness causes high infant mortality rates. The diseases that cause high death rates are bacterial and protozoal diarrhea, hepatitis A, typhoid fever, malaria, and rabies (Demographics 2013). Because the mothers do not have enough nutrition when giving birth to the infants, many of the mothers die in childbirth. And because of the two decades of war, the war also left many people especially children homeless. As a result, there are children on the streets of Afghanistan without a families and shelter. What should the United Nations do to help Afghanistan? To help Afghanistan, the United Nations should assist Afghanistan with food and health problems to help reduce the high morality and birth rates so Afghanistan could start moving towards the third demographic transition.
I am used to being alone as my family has passed I have learned to cope with the losses that I will never pass
In the past ten years the Afghan Government has been dealing with a number of issues that have caused problems for the country, problems such as illegal drug trade, terrorism and violence. But nowadays they are fighting a problem that has long existed between people, and quite recently has taken a whole new aspect to it. Ethnic conflict is the destructive factor that has caused problems between people for generations, often leading to fights, outbreak of violence and grudge between different ethnicities.
Council, H. P. (2012). Afghanistan's vision by 2015 . Kabul: High Peace Council law committee .
(Street children, n.d.) However, this number is not clear because it is impossible for governments or organizations to analyze all street children in the world, and they estimate that the number of street children is increasing steadily every year. Street children do not have a home, and they survive on dirty streets where public sanitation is not provided because of various reasons. Each street child has a painful reason and history. Some of them have familial reasons such as abuse and neglect, and others have social reasons, for instance, war, poverty, and emigration. Therefore, they have some problems and troubles. At first, they cannot keep their health condition. They always starve for food, and they cannot live anymore without begging from someone on the streets for food or finding food