Suppose someone took you far away from your home. You are chained to a carpet loom. For up to 14 hours a day, you are forced to tie many tiny intricate knots to make a rug.
Because you never get any exercise and you have to squat and bend over in front of the loom, after a while your back begins to curve. You don’t get the right kind of food to eat, so you don’t grow as tall as you should. You can’t go to school and you get paid very little for your hard work. In fact, you may not get paid anything at all.
This is the kind of life that many young children live in South Asia. It’s very difficult to know how many children are a part of the carpet industry. The South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude thinks that it may be as many as 200,000 to 300,000 children just in India. Most of them are in what is called the carpet belt in Uttar Pradesh in central India. About the same number may be working in Pakistan.
Many families live very hard lives. They may not be able to care for a child, and so the carpet makers give them money to take a child to the carpet looms to work. Some parents believe that this is the only way their child may be able to live. Sometimes children are actually kidnapped from their parents.
In many families in Pakistan and India, children must work to help support their families. People in the church and others who care about children work to make sure that children who make carpets can work at home in their families. They try to see that children are paid fairly for their work and that they have a chance to go to school.
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