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This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center
By the time the sun sinks over the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, Rekha is struggling to sit still. Twisting her plastic bangles, the 34-year-old mother of two checks her phone to make sure she hasn’t missed a call from her 12-year-old son, who was due home 30 minutes earlier. Rekha wanders outside to peer through the front gate, anxiety sketched all over her face. “This job is too dangerous,” she says, frowning. “Every morning I say goodbye and I pray, ‘Please Allah, send him home tonight.’”
Rekha has cause to worry. In the 18 months since her elder son Rafi started work in a local glass factory, he’s returned home bruised and bleeding more than once. One afternoon, he severed the soft skin of his palm with a sharp blade intended to slice a window pane. As blood soaked the child’s T-shirt, he was rushed to the emergency room by his employer—but nobody called Rekha to let her know. “I feel bad inside, like I am a bad mother,” she says. “I know Rafi doesn’t want to work. He wants to be at school.”
Read More: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Puts Children at Risk
When authorities first shuttered Bangladesh’s schools in March 2020, nobody could have anticipated they would remain closed for the following 18 months, in what would go on to become one of the most restrictive school closures in the world. Classes returned on a rotating schedule in September 2021, but schools were closed for four weeks over January and February amid a COVID-19 surge driven by the Omicron variant. Now, two years on from the first lockdown, child-rights advocates say that tens of thousands of pupils across the country have not returned to school. The majority, they say, are boys ages 12 and above, who during the interim were pushed into full-time work.
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Source : time
