Photo Feature

Children of Karwan Bazar

Photos: Syed Zakir Hossain

Where getting the next meal is never a given as is a place to crash out for the night, street children have few moments of respite. The day is spent trying to collect things to sell, often just scraps of paper retrieved from smelly garbage or vegetables rolled off from speeding trucks and discarded by whole sellers, or by carrying loads for shoppers, helping out at the street restaurants, doing odd jobs at any one of the hundreds of shops at this crowded, chaotic bazaar. Life is not easy, to say the least; there are special dangers for children on the streets. In the backdrop of the most harsh circumstances and utter neglect from the adults around them, they try to escape for a second or two in video games or a rare sweet snack that they must pay for themselves. They work like grown-ups and are paid a pittance yet they are survivors in a cruel world where an empty showcase can serve as a sanctuary for exhausted slumber.

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