Everywhere on Earth

Summer 2004

By Eduardo Galeano

Everywhere on earth, these kids, the children of people who work hard or who have neither work nor home, must from an early age spend their waking hours at whatever breadwinning activity they can find, breaking their backs in return for food and little else. Once they can walk, they learn the rewards of behaving themselves-boys and girls who are free labor in workshops, stores, and makeshift bars, or cheap labor in export industries, stitching sports clothes for multinational corporations. They are manual labor on farms and in cities or domestic labor at home, serving whoever gives the orders. They are little slaves in the family economy or in the informal sector of the global economy, where they occupy the lowest rung of the world labor market:

• In the garbage dumps of Mexico City, Manila, or Lagos they hunt glass, cans, and paper and fight the vultures for scraps.
• In the Java Sea they dive for pearls.
• They hunt diamonds in the mines of Congo.
• They work as moles in the mine shafts of Peru, where their size makes them indispensable, and when their lungs give out they end up in unmarked graves.
• In Colombia and Tanzania they harvest coffee and get poisoned by pesticides.
• In Guatemala they harvest cotton and get poisoned by pesticides.
• In Honduras they harvest bananas and get poisoned by pesticides.
• They collect sap from rubber trees in Malaysia, working days that last from dark to dark.
• They work the railroads in Burma.
• In India they melt in glass ovens in the north and brick ovens in the south.
• In Bangladesh they work at over 300 occupations, earning salaries that range from nothing to nearly nothing for each endless day.
• They ride in camel races for Arab sheiks and round up sheep and cattle on the ranches of the Rio de la Plata.
• They serve the master's table in Port-au-Prince, Colombo, Jakarta, or Recife in return for the right to eat whatever falls from it.
• They sell fruit in the markets of Bogotá and gum on the buses of São Paulo.
• They wash windshields on corners in Lima, Quito, or San Salvador.
• They shine shoes on the streets of Caracas or Guanajuato.
• They stitch clothes in Thailand and soccer shoes in Vietnam.
• They stitch soccer balls in Pakistan and baseballs in Honduras and Haiti.
• To pay their parents' debts they pick tea or tobacco on the plantations of Sri Lanka and harvest jasmine in Egypt for French perfume.
• Rented out by their parents in Iran, Nepal, and India they weave rugs from before dawn until past midnight, and when someone tries to rescue them they ask, "Are you my new master?"
• Sold by their parents for $100 in Sudan, they are put to work in the sex trade or at any other labor.

Reprinted from Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000).

Summer 2004