Poverty and Child Labor in Lusaka

The unemployment level in Zambia is about 50% (of course this is mostly an imaginary number - considering the type of work available, the high amount of under-employment, and the ability to get accurate numbers with a rapidly growing urban population) Check out Steve Allen's blog for some stories on jobs in Zambia (link on the right). Basically people will do anything. We saw people selling hats, grapes, machetes, cellphone chargers, newspapers, and single pairs of highheels or a pair of sweatpants. We saw people riding old-school single-speed bikes loaded with hundreds of pounds of charcol made in the villages and transported to sell in the slums. We saw people selling milkcartons full of thick, highpower corn beer called shake-shake. We also saw people sitting in tarp or cloth covered lean-tos breaking large rocks into gravel and dust. This is a story on the rock breakers.