Who Weaves Your Rugs?
This week, the Dwell blog will follow two former child weavers, Jaya Bhandari and Sanita Lama, on their Young Heroes Tour. Bhandari and Lama, now 19, were rescued from Katmandu carpet factories by RugMark, a non-profit group dedicated to getting children out of the mills and into schools. Over the course of the four-city tour, the youth will share their stories of rescue and rehabiliation as they meet with industry professionals, RugMark donors, students and faculty at Tufts University, and others in New York, Washington, and Miami.
Joining the New York leg of the tour will be Kailash Satyarthi, the founder of RugMark. (If we drew up a list of our all-time heroes it would include Satyarthi, who could be described as the Oskar Schindler of Southeast Asia. He is credited with saving tens of thousands of lives, and last year he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.) Twenty years ago, Satharti was working as an electrical engineer in Bhopal, India, where he noticed growing reports of children abducted to work as slaves in the carpet industry. In some cases, he learned, parents were so poor they sold their children into servitude. In 1994, Satyarthi organized a series of raids to free children working in squalid, overcrowded sweatshops. Out of those efforts grew RugMark, which has rescued 3,000 children from the carpet looms so far.
Joining the New York leg of the tour will be Kailash Satyarthi, the founder of RugMark. (If we drew up a list of our all-time heroes it would include Satyarthi, who could be described as the Oskar Schindler of Southeast Asia. He is credited with saving tens of thousands of lives, and last year he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.) Twenty years ago, Satharti was working as an electrical engineer in Bhopal, India, where he noticed growing reports of children abducted to work as slaves in the carpet industry. In some cases, he learned, parents were so poor they sold their children into servitude. In 1994, Satyarthi organized a series of raids to free children working in squalid, overcrowded sweatshops. Out of those efforts grew RugMark, which has rescued 3,000 children from the carpet looms so far.
do you think all rugs are woven by children, nonsense a propanda of self interest of particular community.
http://www.sadashivan.com/
Posted by sadashivan on 03/06/08 10:35AM PST
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