Children Absorb the Equivalent of 50 Cigarettes in the Average Work Day

In Malwai, Africa, the world’s fifth largest tobacco producer, over 78,000 children are currently working on plantations where they attain the equivalent of 50 cigarettes worth of nicotine a day, according to a recent report from Plan International. They work up to 12 hours a day, for less than 20 cents an hour. They don’t wear gloves or any protective material, their clothes haven’t been ages and they can’t remember the last time bathed.

What’s crucial about this situation is the health of these children. Plan International went to Malawi to survey conditions and interview children would reported illness symptoms such as difficulty breathing, severe headaches, abdominal pain, muscle weakness, and coughing. The report said that by touching tobacco plants unprotected for one day induces the same amount of nicotine as smoking 50 cigarettes.

“Sometimes it feels like you don’t have enough breath, you don’t have enough oxygen. You reach a point where you cannot breathe because of the pain in your chest. Then the blood comes when you vomit. At the end, most of this dies and then you remain with a headache,” one child said.

The above quote was published on Plan International’s website release as well as in an article on CNN.com, my original source of information. The CNN article highlighted all the facts of the report and presented tons of numeric data emphasizing the grand scale of this situation (“The 44 children [a reporter from Plan International] interviewed were working full-time on both large estates and small family farms, but none were working for their own families, and 36 of them were orphans”) as well as incorporated expert advice about these medical conditions (“After reading the Plan report, Spiller, who has researched Green Tobacco Sickness (GTS) in children working on tobacco farms in the U.S., told CNN that the Malawi children's symptoms were "absolutely" consistent with GTS”).

The only downfall of this reporting is that it was done and published over a month after the report was first released. Sources such as BBC News published a photo story August 25, the day the report came out. The Zimbabwean ran a thorough 1,400 word feature over the subject on September 3, only a week after the report was published.

September 9, BBC ran another article, although it had nothing to do with the facts of the case concerning the Plan report. Instead, they broke a story about President Bingu wa Mutharika deporting four senior foreign tobacco buyers for flouting minimum-price rules.

Every country has their unique way of covering a story. Looks like the United States not only lost points in the category “immediacy,” but also their tone to the article was much more economically based than human rights based. CNN analyzed the cost-effect model whereas The Zimbabwean encompasses the story from a civil rights perspective, incorporating information and interviews from NGOs. If each article had incorporated information from the other, both would have been a more comprehensive and reader friendly pieces. My question is where did BBC find their news and why haven’t more organizations found new angles to the tobacco situation in Malawi?  

Death of Child Bride, A Tragedy in Yemen

September 11 was tragic day in America eight years ago. But the date marked another tragedy this year in the Arab world’s poorest country, Yemen. The Yemen Organization for Childhood Protection reported that Fawziya Abdullah Youssef, 12, died of excessive bleeding during child birth of a still born baby. Youssef was one of hundreds coerced into a situation like this.

Exploitation of young girls in Yemen is customary. NYTimes.com said that more than a quarter of females are forced into marriage before 15, and up 50 percent in rural areas of the country. Youssef was no exception.

A reporter from Middle East Online gave details of her family life: raised in an impoverished family, her father suffering from kidney failure, forced to drop out of school and married off at age 11. She became pregnant only a year later.

This is a trend in societal circumstance for the girls married off. Their families need the money and they pay the cost, corporally, mentally, and emotionally. In essence, they are robbed of a childhood and, in the case of twelve-year-old Fawziya, a life. It’s almost as if it’s their job.

"These marriages are the result of poverty, ignorance and illiteracy, and lead to the destruction of the lives of these young girls, whose opinion is not taken in consideration," said Ahmed al-Qorashi, director of Yemen Organization for Childhood Protection.

Middle East Online posted Youssef’s picture with the caption, “Tragic and outrageous,” a sign that activists in the country are fed up and pushing for change. In February, the government passed a law stating the legal minimum age to be married as 17. Last year, a divorce court granted an eight-year-old girl’s request to divorce her 20-year-old husband.

Positive change is coming, but old habits are still hard to break. The divorce lawyer on the case above said in the article on Middle East Online saying she was currently working on a divorce case for a girl whose father married her off at age two. I repeat, age two.

It’s at this point where we must ask ourselves, “Why?” Why do these parents feel so desperate that they would auction off their own daughters? Why can’t they seek help of the government? How can we stop exploitation of girls too young to know what a husband or a marriage is?

The Yemen Organization for Childhood Protection has cut the ribbon on the issue, now it’s our turn to follow up.