One day in 2003, I was caught in typical congested Mumbai traffic, swarming with cars, pedicabs, scooters, and pedestrians, all ignoring whatever few laws governed the city’s movement. It was a very hot day in Mumbai—humid, bright, and sunny. I was on Peddar Road, which is to Mumbai what Park Avenue is to New York: high-rise buildings for some of Mumbai’s wealthiest citizens, and streams and streams of cars. My cab driver had stopped at one of the few traffic lights and turned off his engine to wait until the light turned green a mile ahead.
Suddenly, hearing a gentle tapping on my car window, I looked up from reading my newspaper. I saw a young boy looking at me with big brown eyes and a huge smile. Wearing round wired glasses and no shirt, I thought he was impersonating Gandhi. I rolled down my window. With a toothy grin, he pulled out Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone wrapped in cloudy cellophane.
“Harry Potter, very good book.” His finger was pointing to the book with a huge smile on his face. I said, “Harry Potter?” and he kept on, “Harry Potter, very good book.”
I was curious about him. After just coming back from visiting a grassroots organization working with children on the streets, I had to ask him, “Aapko padhna likhna aata hai?” (Do you know how to read and write?). He looked at me in hurried annoyance with his hands flailing, “Padhna nahi aata hai, likhna nahi aata hai.” (I don’t know how to read or write.)
I looked at him and I smiled, “Mann hai?” (Do you have a desire?)
And all of a sudden that smile went to a distant, wistful sadness. His eyes darted down and into the car, and then he looked at me. He made eye contact and he said, “Mann hai, lekin mein kya karu.” (I have a desire but what can I do.)
“Aap kahan se ho?” (Where are you from?), I asked.
“Mein Bihar se hu.” (I am from Bihar), he answered. That is why he understood my Hindi.
But then he grew impatient, sensing that he wasn’t going to sell me a book. Cars were revving their engines as the light neared its change. He knew that the revving meant it was time to get off the street or he would be killed, and in a blink he disappeared.
He was visible one second, invisible the next. I did not even get a chance to learn his name.
But part of him stays with me still, as well as the realization that here was one of the most popular children’s books of the twentieth century, and this boy could not read it. I thought this was a cruel joke. He was invisible to everybody on that street. In a part of the city where some of the wealthiest people live and businesses thrived, a young boy hawked pirated books that he himself could not read for the sake of a few pennies. He had abandoned his education, or perhaps had never even begun it. His world was a closed, narrow place where the only item on his daily agenda was surviving well enough to do it all again tomorrow.
We cannot discern what we do not see.
Hidden in shrouds of despair, hopelessness, and loss are the lives of hundreds of millions of children and young people. They occupy unseen corners in nearly every part of the world, and no society, no country, is exempt from their impact. For them, there is neither safety net nor safe haven. Their lives do not revolve around school, home, family, or play, as should the life of every child as defined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Their lives carry little wonder and are short on hope. But even though we do not see them, they are all around us.
They are invisible not because they are so few, but because their numbers are so overwhelming that we no longer notice. These are children who are outside the normal reach of social services launched from within their country or through the proliferation of foreign assistance programs targeting the people in poverty. No one finds them, and they live their lives outside any safety net.
They are the children trafficked for harsh labor or sexual purposes; those scavenging in dumps or living on the streets; those discarded, institutionalized, or abused because of physical or mental disabilities; and those suffering from cultural, ethnic, or gender discrimination. They are the children who die from preventable or treatable diseases and those who are conscripted or coerced to fight another person’s war. They are the refugees and migrants who paid for their passage with their childhoods. They are the young men and women with no access to education, jobs, or stability, facing shiftless futures. They have become an accepted part of our global society, the white noise in the background of our constant quest for social and economic development.
But every day, if we choose to look, we can find glimpses in major media stories about dispossessed, brutalized, or forgotten children. We see stories in The New York Times about the harsh conditions children face in all parts of the world. Sometimes they pop up as feature stories in the Sunday magazine. We watch the BBC profile suffering in Africa and Asia, always with a personal story and usually with a name of someone too young to be heard and too far outside the reaches of compassion to be helped.
We can read the metro sections of every major newspaper, from the Washington Post to the Chicago Tribune to the Los Angeles Times, and see stories depicting the trauma visited upon young lives. Mainstream television news from CNN to PBS sends forth images of the catastrophes, the disasters, and the day-to-day anguish of marginalized children. When we turn on the radio, we hear stories of trauma and despair on NPR and Public Radio International, and when we scan online blogs such as The Huffington Post, we read stories that have become all too common.
And it is not just the journalists who bring forth the stories of the marginalized young. Local voices complement these journalists, and we see the perspectives of those who live close to the traumas. Khaled Hosseini, the award-winning author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, relates the anguish of child refugees from Syria, whom he terms “Syria’s Lost Generation,” in an April 2014 The New York Times opinion piece,1 and Izidor Ruckel, who grew up in a squalid Romanian orphanage, now inspects the effects of such places on abandoned children in documentary films and guest editorials.2 In an age of ready communication, witnesses to the despair of children and young people are everywhere.
We pick up periodicals and find advertisements for groups dealing with the hungry, the lost, the orphaned, and abandoned; their suffering eyes so sensational that the heartache behind it becomes a selling point rather than a rallying cry. And when we go to the websites of assistance and development organizations, we find the stories there as well, alive and real, but overwhelmingly present and emotionally numbing. We can easily become immune to it all and choose not to see the children and young people left behind by a fast-paced global society.
But simply because we choose not to see them does not mean that they do not exist.
I have seen these children, and 18 years at The Global Fund for Children has given me more stories than are comfortable to recall. But my stories only go so far. They are anecdotes, and only a sliver compared to the thousands of voices telling hundreds of thousands of stories from across the globe.
Variations of the Harry Potter book seller’s story exist millions of times over if we choose to see them. Today more than half a billion children and young people around the world live in extreme poverty. These numbers will grow as economies and social systems continue to fall short of the capacity to address their needs. We ignore them at considerable social and economic peril, and, in so doing, risk violating the basic tenets of human security.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child eloquently speaks to the inherent responsibility of all societies to provide their children protection, safety, education, opportunities, free expression, and access to healthful living. The words of the Convention speak to an ideal that collectively we have not come close to approaching. Our failures have faces, and, as do all children, they have dreams. What they do not have, at least in sufficient measure, is a voice to call the rest of us to action. They remain in the shadows of our consciousness, in places we know to exist but choose not to visit. They are invisible.
Each of these young people has a name, each of them has a face, and each has a story. From these stories, we can identify the forces that rob children of their future while compromising their present. If we choose to look, we see lessons in these stories, and we can begin to discern the contours of who they are, and how they live.
In the Financial Times, Orla Ryan gives us the story of Joseph. Joseph grew up in a village in Ghana, near the central coastal city of Winneba. When Joseph was quite young, his father left his mother, leaving her to clothe, feed, and educate four children on her own, a common story when responsibilities and obligations overwhelm a father’s strength to meet them. At the age of ten, Joseph abandoned his schooling, committed to helping his mother provide for the struggling family. His mother suggested that Joseph go to work on Lake Volta, a vast...