ENTRY DESCRIPTION
Chakriya lowers her head to insert some plastic inside the sack tied around her waist.
Her pose resembles that of one of the glorious statues represented in the former Soviet Union, with the exception that she is a small child, she is sweating and she knows that she will have to work until late at night. From her waist hangs a sack tied with a piece of rope, and inside it she has been stacking mainly cans and plastic bottles, which are easy and fast to sell. Whenever the weight she carries becomes to heavy, she will stack it somewhere else, away from the other scavengers, who might be tempted to steal its contents.
Despite having ratified in the year 1999 the Minimum Age Convention and the Worst Forms of Labor Convention in 2006 which are implemented by the International Labor Organization, Cambodia still has a significant amount of children involved in different forms of child labor. Among these forms perhaps one of the worst ones is Scavenging. due to the health risks, although within scavenging kids we can distinguish two types; the ones that go wandering about towns riding bicycles and gathering plastic bottles or cans thrown in the garbage cans or sometimes piled up in front of a food store or a restaurant , and the ones who remain active scavenging at a dumpsite, being the task of these ones the hardest one to accomplish. Although most of the children involved in child labor imply the fact of skipping school, which already represents a damaging fact for their futures , we have to understand that scavenging at the dumpsite represents by itself one of the worst forms of child labor, since it implies digging for many hours without any certainty that anything valuable will be found, since most of the garbage has already been searched by other scavengers before its arrival to the dumpsite.
As soon as the sunlight will begin to fade out, Chakriya will pull out her head lamp in order to continue working, but at night, her job will turn much harder.

AUTHOR
My name is Javier Sanchez-Monge Escardo .I was born in Madrid in 1965.Education: Degree in International business management at the Schiller International University Germany (Heidleberg), 3 years of Biology studies at the University of Alcala de Henares and a degree in Philosophy, followed by a PHD still to be finished. Several advanced photography courses, video and editing. Can speak and write in different languages. Constantly I have been travelling around the world, photographing and living in foreign cultures.

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