A young girl helps her mother break coal by hand.
Whole families in Bangladesh travel vast distances to work a job that could, in many ways, be considered a modern form of financial slavery, trapping whole families for their entire lives. At the time this article was first written, much of Bangladesh’s land was taken up by brick kilns and there are estimated to be over 6000 in the Bangladesh countryside, each producing one million bricks, every year. An industry that employs over 500,000 people. In one of the most overcrowded countries in the world, 180 million people on a landmass not much larger than Great Britain, It is an important place of work but the season is short (five months). When the summer came it would bring with it the rains when production stops and the people are forced to return to their villages or the cities where there is little work. They scratch around just to feed themselves until it is time to return to the kilns, where they will live and work once again from dawn to dusk.
