by Elizabeth Leiby
One of my favorite things about working in Chile is being exposed to another culture. El Sembrador provides an opportunity for me to see how children learn about their culture and allows me to learn along with them. During my time there, I learned more about how the Chilean people view protests, which is not something I expected to be exposed to at a preschool. One week, the tías began to teach the children about the rights they have as children. They have the right to play, to eat, to medical care, to get an education, to have a name, to have a family, and to not have to work at a young age. The children were given cards and were supposed to draw a depiction of their rights. Over the weekend, the tías wrote “Los niños no trabajan” in each of the cards. (To the right you can see the posters we made to advocate for child labor laws.)
On that Wednesday, we revisited the topic of the rights of children. We focused mainly on children not having to work because Tuesday (June 12th) was the World Day Against Child Labor. The tías told the students that there are children around the world who are forced to work, including here in Chile where you can see children working in markets, on the subway, and shining shoes in the streets. The tías and I taught the children to chant “los niños no trabajan.” Then we took to the streets. The children handed out the cards they had made to the people we saw in the street while continuing the chant. We walked up and down the street. People came out of their homes to see what we were doing.
It is hard to imagine something like this happening in the United States. While we have protests, they are not nearly as common as they are here in Chile. We also probably would not encourage a classroom of four-year-olds to participate in a protest. It was really interesting to see the children learn about a cause and take some form of action, and it made me realize that sometimes the smallest voices have the largest impact.
Elizabeth Leiby is a second year student studying human rights in Latin America, and spent her summer interning with a child development organization in Chile.