Dear Advocates of ending child labor,

To remain strong in the fight against child labor we must stay connected, especially on
the youth front. After reading this e-mail, please click here and fill out the form. Even if
we collected your contact information at the Children’s World Congress on Child Labor,
please fill out the form. Forward this to youth who attended the Congress or who might
be interested. Spread the word because we need as many committed minds working on
this as possible.

Here is the plan for the Network once it gets started:
During the recent Children’s World Congress on Child Labor in Florence, Italy the idea
was proposed numerous times regarding the need for a children’s network that would
enable the youth who are passionate about this issue to express themselves, keep in touch
with each other, and report on the status of child labor in their villages, cities and nations.
We are providing a platform through the International Center on Child Labor and
Education in Washington, D.C., in the young adult newsletter, Youth Network for
Children’s Rights (YNCR). The goals of this letter are to:

• Give all young people around the world a method to express their feelings and ideas.
• Connect children and youth committed to global rights for children.
• Provide a tool to spread awareness about the realities of situations children face.
• Bridge the gap between children of different cultural, economic, and geographic backgrounds by allowing an exchange of ideas that would otherwise be unattainable.
• Become the largest online forum for the voices of children and young adults to be heard, regardless of language or location.

The purpose of this newsletter is to give young people the opportunity to: share opinions
on matters affecting us; propose our plans or ideas for solving these issues and other
world problems; and to express ourselves creatively – as the desire to create and express
oneself is common to all people.

• Reports on the actions of national, state and local governments affecting children.
• Articles on what children and youth are doing about world issues and children’s rights, particularly child labor.
• Original poems, short stories, drawings or artistic pieces.
• Editorial or opinion pieces about an important local or global issue.

• what we have done since we returned to our countries;
• any progress made in educating the community, governments, trade unions and civil society;
• how our perspectives and views have changed; or
• the follow up actions that we plan to carry out in our communities or through national organizations.

These are just suggestions. Please come up with your own and pursue them.

Once enough contributions are collected and translated into French, Spanish and English,
they will be disseminated in this e-newsletter, along with updates, announcements, and
informational tidbits.

If there is sufficient interest sustained over time we would like to find means to circulate
the newsletter in print form and mail it. This is very important as some of those who need
to be heard by the international community may not have access to computers.

Obviously, the Network will be open to kids who do not speak English, French or
Spanish. *Adults, either chaperons of the kids who attended the Congress or others who
know how to contact kids who might be interested: If at all possible, please translate this
letter into the languages of the kids you know and pass it on to them. Also, your
translation of their responses and/or articles into one of these three languages would be
greatly appreciated. If the response and/or article cannot be translated then send it to us
anyway stating what language it is in. We will find a way to translate it.

This will be a letter that gives young writers creative freedom. It should be a forum to
express ideas and to explore concepts and solutions. What will make this letter stand
apart from other publications is that children write it, produce it, and put it out. In every
letter there will be a section for kids to respond to any articles from previous editions so
that ideas can be debated.

Please respond with any suggestions, questions, or concerns. We look forward to hearing
from you.

Thank you,

Emily, 16, Connecticut.
Maura, 15, NY.
Amanda, 17, MD.

Emily Oliver, Age 16
Newtown High School
Newtown, CT, USA

Child labor is a big problem in El Salvador, according to a Washington Post article on
Thursday, June 10, 2004. In El Chaparral most of the kids work in the sugar cane
industry, which is very dangerous work. Children from the age of 5 years old are already
working with machetes and deep cuts are very common. Many children also suffer burns
from caustic fertilizer that they spread by hand. About 5,000 children younger than 18
years old do the hazardous and backbreaking work of planting or cutting sugar cane in El
Salvador. Sugar is El Salvador’s second most important agricultural product, after coffee.
Foremen on the country’s many small sugar cooperatives, which supply raw cane to
mills, “turn a blind eye” to child labor. And the big companies like Coca-Cola deny that
there is any child labor present during the sugar supply to the company. Coca-Cola is not
accused of breaking laws, but they are not doing enough to eliminate child labor in the
fields. According to the Human Rights Watch the company should “recognize its
responsibility”. Help from big companies would improve the situation. Coca-Cola just
looks at the direct supply of the sugar to the company. However, they should go all they
way back in the sugar supply chain to where they sugar starts out in the fields and not just
in the refinery.

Amanda, Age 17, MD., USA

Kailash Satyarthi, world respected leader of the Global March Against Child Labor, an
international movement to end child labor, was born and educated in India. He went on to
earn a degree in electrical engineering. He could have had a happy and fruitful life in this
profession. However, Mr. Satyarthi saw injustice in the world. Children were used as
cheap labor by men who sought profit. Children were exploited, recruited as a
dispensable form of labor for the most dangerous forms of work conceivable. As a result
of their young sentence to a life of hard manual labor, children were being denied an
education and a chance to escape the poverty of their parents. So much is the empathy of
Mr. Satyarthi, so much is his compassion that he abandoned what would have been a very
comfortable lifestyle to go to the aid of the most defenseless. At the age of 26, Mr.
Satyarthi left his job to start a movement dedicated to freeing oppressed child laborers all
over the world. This Global March works tirelessly for the abolition of child labor and
the achievement of global education. To date, Mr. Satyarthi’s organization the South
Asian Coalition Against Child Servitude has freed over 60,000 children from the horrors
of child labor and servitude.

Besides his fearlessness to stand up and face the powerful and wrong, Mr. Satyarthi’s
ability to catch the hearts and minds of others is what makes him a leader. To hear him
speak is find a renewed sense of optimism. He embodies a kind of fervent hope and
perseverance that is so desperately lacking in most of us. He inspires people to believe in
what he stands for. He inspires people to believe in his vision for the world. He has this
uncommon ability to make people believe that justice is possible for all people, peace is
possible for all people, ignorance is not a fact of life or circumstance, abuse and
exploitation of the children is not justified by poverty, the world can change, and it must
change now in our hands to find a better way.

Emily, Age 16, CT, USA

ICCLE participated in Exhibition organized during the Annual Convention of the National Educators Association at the Washington Convention Center July 2-4, 2004. The purpose of participating in the Exhibition was primarily to expand the constituency interested in global child labor issues within the school teacher community in the U.S. ICCLE took this opportunity to create awareness of global child labor issues and aims to create an informed public opinion on children out of schools. The ICCLE exhibit included lesson plans developed by the American Federation of Teachers, the International Labor Organization’s International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor, and the University of Iowa’s Human Rights Center.

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The ICCLE team was led by Sudhanshu Joshi, Beth Lindley, Tares Vaquez and Fatima Latif. ICCLE made available to the interested teachers materials on child labor perpetuating poverty and provided copies of a consolidated resource list of curricula developed by a variety of organizations. This list is available on the ICCLE web site. The ICCLE team also included the editorial board of ICCLE’s child and youth monthly e- newsletter: 16-year-old Emily Oliver from Newtown High School in Connecticut; 15- year-old Maura Welch, from Christian Brothers Academy in Syracuse, NY; and 17-year- old Amanda Melkert from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland. They were joined by Sharanya Joshi from Lucy Barnsley Elementary School in Rockville, MD and Nimai Joshi from Earl B. Wood Middle School in Rockville, MD. Hundreds of teachers visited the ICCLE Exhibit. In all 178 teachers signed up for future participation in teacher training and orientation on global child labor issues and to receive the ICCLE newsletters for adults and children. They also promised to forward the newsletter to their students so that they will be informed about ICCLE’s initiative with the school children in the US.

After spending time with former child laborers, three high school students have started an international youth-led newsletter called Youth Network for Children’s Rights (YNCR). The purpose of this letter is to provide a forum for children and young adults to discuss child labor, education, and civil rights issues that affect them or their local and global communities. Ideas, thoughts and opinions received from peers around the world will be translated and disseminated all over the world, bridging the gaps between cultures, creeds and countries. This newsletter will connect your students to children in poor countries, enabling them to understand each other’s aspirations. The children in the global north will be able to relate with children who do not have the opportunity to attend schools and who work as slaves. They can decide how to work together to create equal opportunities for all. Let’s start the debate. Let’s open a dialogue. Youth represent the majority of the world’s population. Let’s make this the generation of change. Your students can be part of this newsletter. They can express themselves through articles, opinions, and artistic expressions (poems, pictures, songs, etc.) Your help to make this newsletter popular among children and young adults will go along way in bringing visibility to the issues of children out of school and in the worst forms of child labor. Please help by informing your students to sign up on our website (www.iccle.org) to receive this newsletter via e-mail.

ICCLE.net, ICCLE.org and Global March.org newsletters are delivered using a spam-free mailing list. Nobody is allowed to post to this list other than us, and your email address will never be revealed by us to any other entity. That is a promise. Please note that we are extremely sensitive about unsolicited mail. If you have any concerns about such issues, or believe you have been spammed by ICCLE.net address, please forward that e-mail to us at abuse@iccle.net. We will investigate and also immediately remove you from this list.