The heats rays continuously slap across one’s neck, shoulders and back feel like fifty lashings with a whip made up of hell’s fire especially after an arduous, twelve-hour day at work. Juan lifts the hem of his V-neck shirt to wipe the continuous flow of perspiration from his brow simply to realize his efforts are from fruitless. For his shirt is already soaked through from the plethora of times Juan has mirrored this process in the past twelve hours. Trying to focus on the agricultural task at hand, one forearm continues to rise towards one’s brow while the other is charged with the task of swatting away the relentless string of flies that always seem to land only on his neck. Vivid daydreams of a seventeen-minute break drift in and out of Juan’s head as he attempts to focus on his work, repressing the reality that lunch passed hours ago. Every few minutes he looks around the world of his conscience and asks the one question the matters, Why am I doing this? And he is answered by the only person that matters, as his own voice replies, Because I am the only one who can.
Wouldn’t it be amazing to assume that this was just the horrid creation of a student slightly gifted in the art of story telling? The harsh reality of the situation is the fact that this is indeed a reality: The fact that there are children across the globe, and specifically in Latin America working under similar if not synonymous situations as the one described above. Though before the horror of the situation can be described in depth, it is first important to provide the actual definition of the situation. “The gainful employment of children below an age determined by law or custom” (Dictionary.com) is how the act of child labor is most commonly defined as. Though the ILO provides a more, if you will, profound definition of child labor, which they state as, “any work that is detrimental to a child’s well-being or interferes with a child’s education” (Tauson). If one chose to stop there, the...