疫情肆虐, 乌干达儿童如何艰难度日(1)

AMNA NAWAZ: Well, the effects of the pandemic on children vary dramatically depending on the country. With schools still shuttered in Uganda and other developing nations, many children have no choice but to work to survive. In Africa, more than a fifth of all children, or some 87 million kids, work.

Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports from Kampala.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It looks like a scene set in the Middle Ages, a gaping, sprawling stone quarry just outside Uganda's capital. It is also a gravel factory, all of it done by hand, large, small, and very small hands. Evelyn is 11 years old. She works every day balancing on a makeshift ladder to crack open the rock face. Her family will then pound the larger rocks into gravel with crude hammers. For some, the only available tool is a larger rock. Evelyn's mother, Sylvia Naggujja, who has done this work for more than a decade, labors by her side, next to six brothers and sisters. For all this work, they earn less than $2 a day. That's the whole family.

SYLVIA NAGGUJJA: We go and break stones. Like, that plastic jerrican you see there. We fill it at 300 shillings for each jerrican.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It's exhausting, dangerous work, a scene repeated at dozens of sites in the area. Accidents and injuries are common, especially among young children.

EVELYN: Life is not OK. When I break these stones, sometimes,

they cut my fingers. Sometimes, the small pebbles fall into my eyes. Life is not good. Another time, a big stone hit me on the head right here.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: But what weighs on Evelyn most is her life before the pandemic. Aside from a few weeks between Uganda's two COVID surges, schools have been shuttered across this nation of 44 million.

EVELYN : I miss school. I miss work at school. I work every day. I would like to be a doctor or a nurse. I wanted to go to school, go to university, possibly go abroad and help my mother.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It is not uncommon to see young children doing hard work, fetching water or wood for the family cook stove. But, whether in quarries, mines, or farmland more and more children are being forced to work for their survival. 2020 was the first year in two decades that saw an increase in child labor around the world. And with the pandemic devastating economies, the United Nations says the problem is getting much worse. It issued a report that found 160 million children, some as young as 5, working in child labor, many doing tasks that directly threaten their health and safety.

ANGELLA NABWOWE: I saw a 9-year-old in a gold mine.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: As the mother of a 9-year-old herself, human rights advocate Angella Nabwowe says the encounter stopped her in her tracks.

ANGELLA NABWOWE: I was practically looking at my daughter doing that work. I talked to this girl. She lives with her grandmother. They have nothing, nothing. A 9-year-old in a gold mine working, it is not right. It's not.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: She says years of progress have been wiped out by the pandemic, as have the income and prospects of a large number of Uganda's poorest people, who live hand-to-mouth in the mostly informal economy.

ANGELLA NABWOWE: The urban areas, the official data is that 23 percent of that lost everything. They do not have any source of what? Income, because of COVID-19.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It's not just income, she says. For many children, the loss of school has deprived them of a reliable meal each day. As we saw in this school in 2017, meals are often provided across the developing world to boost both nutrition and attendance. That all stopped when the schools closed.

ANGELLA NABWOWE: Food is a basic right. People don't have what to eat. And what is the effect of that?

TYLER DUNMAN: It's been pretty catastrophic.