L’idée de ce bulletin est de laisser les jeunes personnes: partager nos opinions sur les
sujets qui nous concernent; proposer nos plans et nos idées pour résoudre les problèmes
du monde, et; exprimer leur créativité.

• rapports sur les actions des gouvernements dans vos pays qui affectent les enfants,
• articles qui décrivent ce que les enfants et les jeunes font au sujet des droits des enfants, spécifiquement le travail des enfants,
• poèmes, histoires courtes, dessins, et autres pièces artistiques,
• pièces d’écriture d’opinion au sujet des problèmes dans votre communauté, ou dans le monde, et,
• commentaires sur les articles du passé.

Emily Oliver, 16, Newtown High School, Newtown, Connecticut.
Maura Welch, 15, Christian Brothers Academy, Syracuse, New York.
Amanda Melkert, 17, Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, Chevy Chase, Maryland.

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 Melkert, Age 17
Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, Chevy Chase, 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 Oliver, Age 16
Newtown High School, Newtown, 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 Vazquez 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.