By: Becky Richardson To help to raise awareness of the global campaign to put an end to the suffering of children in slavery, Mickey Choothesa is proud to share some of his stories. Buying a bunch of flowers is to many of us a fairly innocuous and frequently pleasant activity. However, buying a bunch of flowers from a child in many cities in SE Asia should invoke anything but a pleasant feeling. In order to explain why, I would like to tell you a story about an eight year old girl named Chau. I first met Chau, which means “pearl” in Vietnamese, when I was in Ho Chi Minh City. Every night during my stay I would see Chau, in the same white dress with the broken zipper, selling flowers to passing tourists. She can ask customers the questions: ‘Do you want to buy some flowers’, ‘Do you want me to guess your weight’, and ‘How many dollars do you have?’ in as many as ten languages. Instead Chau, along with a dozen more girls just like her, is brought to various street corners and parks every night by her ‘adopted ‘family to sell flowers. The girls are forced to work until the early hours of the morning whilst their ‘family’ watches from afar to ensure that they do not stop. Chau wasn’t sure what to make of me – I was the guy who always smiled and always brought her sweets and a drink and yet always refused to buy a flower. The reason for my refusal is simple – buying flowers from such children endorses and supports child labor. It is easy to fool ourselves into thinking that by purchasing a bunch of flowers from the small children with the sad eyes; we are in some way helping them. Unfortunately the opposite is true, the children are not paid for their work and by purchasing flowers, or chewing gum, or snacks from them all we succeed in doing is reinforcing the supply and demand cycle. Such issues are not confined to the street of Ho Chi Minh. Recently I came across such a similar situation right in my own back yard. Whilst visiting one of the waterfalls in Chiang Mai, I saw a group of girls dressed up in rational hill tribe clothing selling flowers to the tourists visiting the waterfall. All were very young; some were no older than four. They had been brought to the waterfall by a local group calling themselves “Flowers for the hill tribe’s project” who claimed to be helping people living in certain hill tribes. I found this hard to believe given that the ‘project’ was clearly using children as its workforce. I began to investigate the “Flowers for the hill tribe’s” project and discovered that the young girls selling the flowers were ‘owned’ by a wealthy business man who was also the owner of a large flower farm. The girls were all from hill tribe communities and therefore lacked a Thai National ID making them easy prey for those who sought to exploit them. These children suffer in silenc ,they have no official identity , they have no voice, they are the nameless victims of a global problem which exists due to a supply and demand system that tourists help to perpetuate. So please, when you travel and when you visit new places, think of Chau and the thousands like her and refrain from buying flowers or chewing gum or the fried insects that the children sometimes sell; because to buy such items is to support child labor and the exploitation of children who are unable to say no.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 06:12:16 +0000