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My name is Victor Osman Suxo Quispe and I am 13 years old.
I help my dad and my mom.
I take the cows out to pasture.
I have to take them to the barley field.
Then I have to wash my hair, and then I go to school.
There, I study and learn some words.
Victor is one of more than 800,000 children in Bolivia who work.
That's almost a quarter of the infantile population.
And since Victor is only 13 years old,
and under Bolivian law boys under the age of 14 are prohibited from working,
he is, in reality, breaking the law.
But according to Pedro, who worked from the age of 7 and managed to study and excel:
One thing is an ideology, utopia or dream, and another thing is reality.
There is not enough money to help me.
Sometimes I slaughter a cow to sell it. That way I help myself.
It is not possible to earn more money.
If the parents had jobs and the children had real access to school or health services,
the number of children who work would automatically start to decrease.
A law that tells them they are forbidden to work, or anything like that,
would be unnecessary, because the numbers would decrease.
This is more a question of necessity.
For example, if you want to study, you have to work.
If I didn't work, I wouldn't be putting the cows out to pasture.
And I wouldn't be in school. I wouldn't have money. I would have nothing.
Work is an instrument of survival.
And a law that prohibits child labor doesn't fit in Bolivian society.
We live here. My kids are helping me with the work.
We are suffering.
Sometimes potatoes grow, but then the ground freezes and we lose our harvest.
And we are suffering, and sometimes we don't eat.
With my money, I buy some clothes and notebooks,
and pencils that I need.
Sometimes my father helps me. When I don't have enough money,
my father helps me.
Nowadays, it is not a matter of whether children work.
It's a question of giving them the right to choose if they want to work or not.
Victor chose to work
and, as all indigenous children traditionally do, he works in the fields helping his family.
In addition, he travels to the city every Friday
to earn some money as a "crier" for public transportation [announcing bus routes].
If he didn't do this, he wouldn't be able to study
and he probably would end up like his 11 siblings, who didn't finish school.
They were 15 siblings, but four of them died.
Bernardo, his older brother, faints often
and the school didn't accept him.
His younger sisters also don't go to school.
I believe that children must work. If they don't have money, they must work,
"shouting" in the minibus, or the girls must work as maids. That is what must be done.
That's why the decision to work is obvious here.
Moreover, the children and teen worker's movement in Bolivia
managed to modify a fundamental article that has already been included
in the new state constitution.
In article 61, it said that all forms of child labor were prohibited,
but the proposal of the NATs said that
what should be prohibited was child exploitation, and not the right of adolescent boys and girls to work.
In Bolivia, more than 60 percent of the population is poor.
In the fields, eight out of every 10 people are poor, and nine out of every 10 children are indigent.
Efforts by the government to enable children not to abandon school
because of a lack of resources are still insufficient.
And without education, the cycle of poverty continues.
Because of this, Victor's financial contribution to his family signifies, above all,
the possibility of leaving that poverty and reaching the dreams that he doesn't currently have.
When I ask him what he wishes for, he is silent.
He says that he would like to be a policeman or doctor.
But while Victor works to achieve a dream,
for the time being it's enough to aspire to a worthwhile life that allows him to eat, go to school
and, sometimes, to play.