No cleverness from me
Beggar, Serf, Soldier, Child
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
DAKAR, Senegal — They stand at my taxi window, scrawny and unwashed, holding up empty tomato tin cans. They scratch their scabby arms. They wipe their running noses. Listlessly, they chant verses from the Koran. More often, they dispense with the formalities and beg: "Cent francs, ma tante, cent francs, cent francs."
These are the talibes, or beggar boys, of Senegal, dispatched onto the streets by religious leaders, called marabouts, and ordered to collect a daily quota ranging from 250 francs to 650 francs (50 cents to $1.30), along with whatever else is dropped in their tin cans: sugar cubes, biscuits, milk powder, kola nuts. If they fail, they face a beating.
From Bombay to Mexico City to Bangkok, child beggars are a banal fact of life: Unicef reported last week that half the world's children, a billion people, face extreme deprivation. But there are degrees of misery even among the miserable, and the talibes who greet me every time I return home to Dakar are a troubling reminder that West and Central Africa, which I am leaving after two years, can be an appalling place to be a child.
Of the 27 countries with the worst child mortality rates, 26 are in Africa, most in this part of Africa. Children here not only reflect all that ails their countries, but they also pay the dearest price. AIDS has orphaned them, poverty has driven parents to sell them as cheap labor. And everywhere, warlords turn them into soldiers.
