Broken childhoods

Dhurata’s days are very sad. They end the same way they begin, filled with fear and sadness. Instead of comfortable rest in the evening, she lays down in a bed with torn sheets and a twisted pillow on which to lay her unwashed hair.

At night, the moonlight sneaks in the window. In the morning, the moon is replaced with the sun, reminding the 12-year-old that it is time to start another tiring day. She may have a little milk, maybe a piece of bread or she may get no food to start her day.

The house where she lives with her family sits atop a hill in Librazhd region. The village looks picturesque when seen from outside, from afar. From the inside, however, it is anything by picturesque.

So deeply has this child understood her poverty that she doesn’t even smile. Her white face bears the scars of the sun and hunger. Her eyes lack hope. Her yellow hair, tied carelessly, falls upon her shoulders. From the walls of her house, badly painted in white, hang poorly mounted sockets and calendars with violet roses. In the yard, there are sacks full of cans—cans that she, her younger cousin and her very old grandmother have collected. These cans will buy the bread for their table. At least she will be able to eat today.

The girl wears rags and is surrounded by others, very similar to her in their misery. She almost doesn’t speak. Silence is the way she deals with her sadness which is cultivated by the poverty of her family members and co-villagers of the area. The thought that across the region more children are constantly born into similar, miserable circumstances makes even the awesome panorama of natural beauty vanish immediately.

The inhabitants of Librazhd often see her, her cousin and her grandmother begging. All three of them, covered in dust, beg - for money, for food, for anything. They beg on the main street, in the bars that host tired travellers, and in the shops. When she isn’t begging, her days are spent collecting cans. The whole family must work the entire time, just to survive. Although she would like to go to school, she shows up at its door only rarely.

Different village; same sadness

In another poor village, in the district of Dibra, another family of children share elements of Dhurata’s story. For more than a year, these children have lived alone. Initially, their father went to Greece to find work. Last year, their mother joined him, leaving her second son, who is just 19 years old, to care for his three younger siblings. The children’s grandmother and elder sister (who is married) stop by most days to help cook or clean. The rest of the time, the children make it on their own. They often go out with their elder brother to collect medicinal herbs in the forest and then sell them later.

The house they live in is falling apart. The walls of dried mud that surround the yard are crumbling. To make matters worse, neither the house nor the land on which it sits belongs to the family. It was loaned to them so they could take temporary shelter. The children spend the day on the couches with broken legs and old chairs, looking at the badly painted walls that still show the previous colour, something undefined between light green and green. The old pans, the broken cups, the no-shine spoons are another story, and so are the children’s clothes.

The youngest sister, only 9, has taken care of the house as best she can: she tried to wash the dishes and clean up. Her two other brothers, 11 and 12 years old, help their eldest brother  collect medicinal herbs. Between abandonment by the parents and the need to work daily, for their survival, these children almost never go to school.

Minors at work

How much do children in Albania work? For the first time, we have a national research study on their employment. A recent study by INSTAT (Albanian Institute of Statistics) and ILO (International Labour Organization), based on interviews with 6,000 children between the ages of 5 and 17 years revealed that 7.7 per cent of Albanian children between the ages of 5 and 17 work, often beyond their capabilities. The study estimates that about 54,000 children in Albania work. Perhaps the most alarming part is that the study shoes that a serious percentage of those who work, 2.4 per cent of the general population of children who work are between the ages of 5 and 11. Children who work average 18.7 hours a week.

Minors work mainly in agriculture, about 80 per cent of those who work, spend a good part of the day ploughing the soil or caring for cattle. Others are employed with their family members in a family business where they are often left for several hours a day in stores, in internet rooms, in the small tourist hotels, or to help supply the family’s mini-market. Often they are not even thanked as this engagement is seen as a natural part of their life, something they have to do. Shkodra and Elbasan are the two districts with the highest rate of children’s employment.

Why do Albanian children work?

The families of Dhurata’s from Librazhd and the three children from Dibra are extremely poor. Their families’ poverty partially explains why they spend endless hours of work that is inappropriate for their age, far from school.

Dhurata’s family has a few cattle and very little land. The village where they live is very rocky. Both parents have almost never had a paid job. In Dibra, the parents’ abandonment adds to the children’s poverty. Poverty and child abandonment constantly push minors toward working beyond their might.

Poverty of mind as much as poverty of the pocketbook

However, as the study shows, poverty is not the only cause for children’s work. It seems as if for many adults, working children is an expectation, a cultural norm.

“It is worth mentioning the fact that in Albania, the concept still prevails that children are property and not persons with their own rights and desires. This is one of the factors that lead to consequences, such as child abuse. Exploitation for work is one of [child abuses’] main forms,” says Izela Tahsini, a lecturer of social work, who has often been engaged with children’s problems in Albania. The Albanian Labour Code envisions employment opportunities for children, always above 14 years old and only during school holidays. The work they do should always be light, something that doesn’t make their lives difficult, but instead educates them. Many Albanian minor workers, however, maybe most of them, work beyond their capabilities and in very difficult conditions. They work long hours in the fields, streets, or markets, and even in mines and on construction sites (the last two make up for about 3 per cent of the child workers).

Since the Labour Code speaks clearly for children’s protection, but adults don’t seem to know boundaries well, the reaction of the civil society is quite clear. “As an organization that works directly with 32,000 children in need in Albania, some of whom are employed, World Vision thinks and believes that their employment, outside the legal framework, is a violation of their rights. Often employment causes physical and psychological damage. And, at the same time, [it] limits children’s possibilities and opportunities to develop their [full] potential,” says MigenaShulla, Director of Integrated Programs at World Vision in Albania & Kosovo. It is this organization that identified and helped the above mentioned children .

Education and health in question

The consequences of work on their little bodies are already visible. “It has been estimated that 13 percent of working children have gone through an illness or injury caused by work one year before this study… Extreme exhaustion and high fever are the most common health problems they encounter. A higher percentage of boys than girls suffer from health problems caused by work. The most common risks in the workplace that children encounter are: extreme fever, high or low, and work in environments with dust and smoke. Furthermore, 8.2 percent of children complain about unfavourable treatment at work, mainly in the form of yelling and beating,” the study maintains.

Consequences in education are even stronger.  A typical working child completes compulsory education but doesn’t continue to high school. It is very probable that he/she will repeat the year. In general, work and education after compulsory education can’t coexist: only 61.9 per cent of working children attend school, compared to 89.1 per cent of children who do not work. “The comparison of working children and those who don’t work found that at 17 years of age, those who work have done 4 less years of education than those who don’t,” the study says.

Back to the children...

For a long time, absence from school was the greatest regret of Bulen, the 11-year old boy from Dibra. Unlike his other siblings, who seemingly had found peace with abandoning education, he stopped going to school not because he didn’t have a parent to send him there, but because he had no more books. However, he didn’t put his school bag under the couch. He kept it out, always in front of his eyes, in the hope that someone would buy the books for him the next day. “I want to go to school…I think of myself as a bad boy when I don’t,” he says, explaining why his school bag is on the top of a chair in their house.

Some time ago, his bag was finally filled with the long-awaited books. Together with them, following the help that World Vision gives to minors, the family received furniture, food and clothes from World Vision. The organization also facilitated more frequent conversations with their relatives. Their parents, who had gone to Greece, finally returned. Poverty, however, is still there. It is visible in the half-destroyed yard and the house carelessly painted with lime. But, at least one child is back to school. And back to hope.

Additionally, to help improve the nutrition of the children, Dhurata’s family was given some goats by World Vision so that the children can at least enjoy a glass of milk. Hopefully, with care and dedication they will be able to multiply the number of goats and generate additional income.  

Will they ever make it out of the poverty cycle? Maybe yes, maybe no. However, it is clear that the long, tiring work and dropping out of school pushed them to the wrong direction. And this is not only the case for Bulen and his siblings and Dhurata, it is the case of at least 54,000 children everywhere in Albania.