疫情肆虐, 乌干达儿童如何艰难度日(2)

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Tyler Dunman, a lawyer with a human rights group, is on loan to Uganda's director of public prosecutions. Unlike children such as Evelyn, who work with their parents, many have been trafficked into labor, he says. It's illegal, but enforcement is spotty, complicated further by the pandemic.

TYLER DUNMAN: Oftentimes, they're finding themselves on the streets begging, or being forced to sell things, or, as they call it, hawking things here. Those situations have increased exponentially.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: So has trafficking into the sex trade, he says. Young women are particularly vulnerable. And there's another risk. Social workers we talked to say they have seen a spike in teen pregnancies.

ESTHER: I'm 15 years old.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: We visited Esther in this Kampala slum. She enjoyed school and got good grades, and, when school stopped, she took a job in a food stand to help out the family. Then she became pregnant, the result of boredom and rebellion, she now admits. When the baby arrives in February, school will be out of the question, impractical, she says, and unaffordable.

ESTHER: I was studying to become a doctor. I missed the company of my friends. We used to sit down there. We would talk. We would be reading books.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: What is your dream for your future?

ESTHER: My dream is, if I have a chance, I want to learn how to weave hair, do hair, and, in the process, be able to start my own business.

ROGERS MUTAAWE: How do they survive? Because their parents cannot meet their basic needs.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Rogers Mutaawe runs the Uganda Youth Development Link, part of a team of charities that work with at-risk youth. Since March of 2020, the number of young people they're helping train for safer jobs has nearly doubled. When we visited, they were learning baking, cupcakes on this day.

ROGERS MUTAAWE: And so we are trying our best as a program, as an organization to be able to give them a second hope, to give them some future to their lives, because most cases is young people have been vulnerable, they have been left alone, they have low self-esteem, they have depression.