This story first appeared in Zan Times
By Mahtab Safi
Shagoufa* is a 10-year-old child who carries adult responsibilities on her small shoulders. She works with her father and two younger brothers in one of the clay kilns. Even her youngest brother, 5-year-old, makes bricks. Though they are residents of the Sayad district of Sar-e Pul province, they spend nine months a year working in the clay kilns in Sheberghan city of Jawzjan province. Each day, while Shagoufa, her father and brothers work at the kilns, her mother cooks and does other household chores.
The work of Shagoufa and her family starts before sunrise and ends after sunset. The first thing Shagoufa does is collect the dried bricks that they produced the day before, so her father can sort them for the kiln. While her father manages the kiln, Shagoufa and her two brothers mold new bricks from the clay that has been prepared by their father. This family produces an average of 500 clay bricks a day, which earns them 250 afghanis.
In the last days of autumn, the bitter cold makes it difficult to be outdoors, but the family still works outside producing bricks. “The weather is so cold that when I pour the clay into the molds, my hands freeze,” Shagoufa says in an interview with Zan Times.
For nine months each year, they live in a one-room home that Shagoufa’s father built with the bricks that they have produced. This hut does not have a window or a door, so they endure scorching heat in the summer and severe cold in the autumn, which often makes them sick. There is no doctor or hospital near this clay oven. “We are used to diseases. If one of us gets sick, we wait, and after a few days she or he will recover again. If the illness lasts longer or worsens, we will have to go to the city,” explains Mirwais*, Shagoufa’s father
In late December, Shagoufa and her family return to their home in Sar-e Pul. After three winter months, they return to the furnaces of Jawzjan in the spring.
Shagoufa’s cheeks are red with happiness; she is happy to return to her home province where she has time to learn to read at the informal mosque school. Shagoufa wants to go to school but her dream faces two big obstacles: extreme poverty and the ban on education for girls beyond grade 6. Still she dreams, “I would really like to go to school and study every day, instead of working.”
Shagoufa and her siblings are three of the more than 2,000 children who endure forced labour in Jawzjan, according to data from Save the Children. Children are the majority of the brick-making workforce in Afghan kilns, an International Labour Organization (ILO) study states, explaining how dangerous it is for children: “Work in brick kilns is painfully exhausting and the hours are long as they extend 10 to 15 hours a day. The working environment is extremely unhealthy as these children work typically with no shelter and in direct exposure to the sun and dust. Younger children help with clearing the fields of rubble, arranging the dried-out bricks in stacks, fetching water to make clay, and bringing sand to lay under the bricks.”
More and more children are being forced into work. In a report published in February 2022, Save the Children said that incomes had plummeted so far in the past six months that 18 percent of families had no choice but to send their children into the labour market. Save the Children estimated that if just one child in each family is working, that would add one million children to an overall number that is thought to already be well more than two million. In a 2019 report, the International Labour Organization found that more than half of all children surveyed were engaged in labour, with nine percent being exposed to hazardous work, including carpet-making, mining and working in brick kilns.
Now the clay ovens in Sheberghan have become the home of many working children in this province. Nematullah*, 13 years old, is another child who works with his family of eight in a brick kiln near Sheberghan. Like Shagoufa’s family, his family travels from Sar-e Pul to Jawzjan to work in a clay kiln.
Nematullah, the eldest child, has to bear most of the burden of the work as his father is sick and his mother is so busy dealing with her husband and young children that she can only occasionally help by picking up bricks. So it falls to Nematullah to prepare both the mud and the clay. If his little brothers and sisters get tired and rest, even for a few moments, Nematullah has to work non-stop until evening to finish their family’s work. “My back and legs hurt from working too much,” he says.
Nematullah wishes to become a doctor and treat poor patients like his father for free. “The first time I dreamed of becoming a doctor was when we transferred one of the sick workers from the furnace to the hospital. His condition was very bad, but the doctors helped him,” he recounts. But poverty does not allow him to study:
Mohammad*, Nematullah’s father, says that he does not know exactly what disease he is suffering from because he doesn’t even have money to go to the doctor. Nematullah’s mother, Bibi Gul, has a deep wound on her right hand. She attempts to treat it by applying an eye ointment that she bought two months ago to treat her eyes. Bibi Gul was herself a child worker. “I have made bricks here since I was young, got married and had children, and now my children are also forced to do the same work,” she says. “The fate of poor people will never change.”
Since the Taliban regained power, poverty and hunger have intensified and families have been forced to send their children to work instead of going to school. The economic situation has worsened since the Save the Children report was published in February, meaning that even more families have no choice but to have their children scrounge for whatever work they can find.
On December 1, a new Gallup poll showed that almost the entire population of Afghanistan (98 percent of those surveyed) say they are “suffering,” while only two percent say they are “struggling.” No one chose the third option, “thriving,” in the results published by the respected international polling firm. The poll found that nine out of 10 Afghan are finding it “difficult or very difficult” to make ends meet, with more than 90 percent rating the situation as “bad” for finding jobs. The survey also notes that “the percentage who say it is a bad time to find a job in their communities soared to a record 92% in 2022.
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees.