14 June 2007 - 16:05
The thing is, you’re six years old. You shouldn’t have to spend your entire day on the street, asking strangers to give you food to eat or money and dry goods to take back to your master. But you do. You were born into a poor family, one that decided that they couldn’t provide for you, and so they sent you off to the traditional Koranic schools, called madrasas. And just like that you became an almoody, a a can kid, a street urchin. You get one pair of ill-fitting cast-off clothes (shoes? yeah, right.) and a big, empty tomato paste can that you are supposed to take out and get filled up with food and money every day. You spend the entire day on the street, trying to fill your can and your belly. You’re pretty much on your own for food, and your build shows it – you look like a stick, no fat, no muscles, wounds that won’t heal, scabs on your head, swollen stomach. While other kids are in school, you ply the corners and restaurants, begging. In place of a formal education, you get instruction on the Koran in the mornings and evenings. Real classes are out of the question – you only get instruction in a language you don’t understand about a book that holds very little importance to you at this point in your life. You don’t even understand what the recitations you’re forced to memorize mean because it’s in a language you don’t speak, and haven’t been (nor will you be) taught to understand. You only know that if you don’t memorize the passages quickly enough to satisfy the teacher, you get beat, leaving more open, untreated sores, more scabs, more scars. The same punishment goes for not returning with the dollar’s worth of ougiyas you’re supposed to collect each day. Sometimes, near the end of the day, you get desperate to fill your quota – you’ll ask anyone, anyone, just so you don’t have to go back to the madrasa without those last few ougiyas. When you get back, all the money goes to the head of the school, the marabout. The same for any dry goods and food you’ve collected that day – soap, flour, rice, pasta, etc. Depending on what comes in, you might get a decent meal every once in a while. Not likely, but sooner or later, the teacher is bound to be in a good mood when someone brings something good home. If you’re lucky. You’re rarely lucky. What you call “life,” the UN calls “a human rights abuse,” but you don’t have a choice – you’re six years old, and this is what you’re stuck with. Your family is too poor to care for you, there are no orphanages in your godforsaken country (Why not? There are plenty of NGOs that would gladly set up orphanages, but that would undermine your country’s “traditional way of life”), and the madrasas are a socially accepted (preferable, some people think) alternative to a poor home life. No one in the whole country cares what’s happening to you every day of your life. No one cares that you’ll leave the school in your teens with no applicable skills and no real education, apart from being able to recite your religion’s holy book in a language no one speaks anymore. No one cares that you’re getting beaten and ignored, or that you’ll spend your whole life malnourished, without the ability to contribute to society, if you even make it out of the school alive, which isn’t guaranteed. No one cares enough to stand up and say “This is wrong.” But what can you do? Your life is terrible, and you’re six years old.
