Mioi Nakayama, Part 1
India has the largest number of child laborers

Mioi Nakayama (second from left) instructs Bornfree children as they learn a dance for a musical play. (Photographed in February 2011)

Mioi Nakayama

Born in Hiroshima in 1977. After graduating from Rikkyo University, she worked at the Japan International Center for the Rights of the Child (JICRC). In 2002, she went to India. In 2005, she became involved in a photo project to help draw attention to the issue of child labor, and this led to the founding of the Bornfree Art School. As well as serving as Bornfree's co-director, a role she assumed in 2010, she is responsible for the children's dance training. She lives in Bangalore, India.

I serve as the co-director of the Bornfree Art School in Bangalore, a city in southern India. Bornfree is a school for street children and children who were forced to work. Founded in 2005, the school now has about 20 students, ranging in age from 10 to 18.

India has the largest number of child laborers in the world. It is said that the number is even equivalent to the whole Japanese population of roughly 130 million. To poor Indian families, their children are a source of labor, so many of these parents won't permit their children to attend school.

In our work, we approach children who are living on the streets and encourage them to come to Bornfree. We also do what we can to persuade parents who make their children work to let them attend our school instead. Through art activities, things that children have a natural interest in such as music, dance, and theater, we awaken the importance of learning in our students. For example, the children take photos and we then ask them to create titles for their images. This raises their awareness of the need for writing, and so their motivation for learning grows.

Beyond the fact that these children have been deprived of love from their parents, there have also been cases in which the children were abused or were present when a parent committed suicide, and this has left them suffering from trauma. Their participation in art activities also offers them the opportunity to express themselves and fosters confidence and self-respect. A child who had been addicted to drugs can now dream about the future again.

Bornfree is involved in peace activities as well. The amount of money the government of India spends on its military is 300 times the amount spent on education. If India can develop friendly relations with its neighbor, Pakistan, it could spend more money on education instead of the military, and we believe that would lead to the end of child labor.

In 2008, we took 35 children on a peace pilgrimage, by bicycle, from Bangalore to the Pakistan border, a trip of 3,000 kilometers. Along the way, we gathered 7,000 messages of peace from Indian children to Pakistani children. In 2006, we took 30,000 photos of child labor and we submitted these photos to the Indian National Assembly, and the result was a resolution demanding that regional governments swiftly face the problems which sustain child labor so that this practice can be abolished.

Our hope is that the children who have escaped their lives as child laborers will take up the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, advocating non-violence and appealing for the right to education to be guaranteed.