#Honduran #boy #barber #scissors
Eduardo Espinal runs his own barber shop in a small zinc-roofed building in Honduras and opens the doors at 8am for a 12-hour workday. He is 12 years old.
When it’s quiet, he plays hide-and-seek or soccer with his friends. He hasn’t been to school since last year.
Although it is illegal for children under the age of 14 to work in Honduras, Eduardo is one of tens of thousands working in the poverty and crime-ridden Central American country.
In 2021, more than one in ten Honduran children aged five to 18 were working, according to Horacio Lovo of the national statistics institute INE.
Half a million of the country’s 2.3 million children were not going to work or school.
“I really like the barbershop and I like studying too,” Eduardo told AFP outside his Eduar Barber Shop, which he opened last month on the outskirts of Comayagua in central Honduras.
Depending on the style, he charges between $2 and $3 per cut.
On his best day ever, he made $45 — a small fortune in a country where a third of the population of nearly 10 million lives on less than $1 a day.
– ‘Dad, I can cut’ –
Eduardo’s father, Wilfredo Espinal, 50, makes a meager living by collecting river sand to sell to builders. His mother, Merlin Carranza, does not work.
To help his family, the boy said he began working as an apprentice at the hair salon last year, aged just 11, where he and his father got their hair cut.
His father bought him a pair of scissors to practice with at home.
A month ago, Eduardo said to his father: “Daddy, I can cut, I want you to buy me a (barber’s) chair,” Wilfredo Espinal told AFP.
The father obliged, taking out a loan to buy the chair, scissors, razor and other needed equipment, and helping the boy set up a shop in a small building formerly owned by Eduardo’s grandmother.
On a normal day, “I get up, I bathe, I dress, I eat and I come here” to the store, the boy told AFP.
“I play when I don’t have customers,” he added.
According to Lovo, Eduardo’s example is a “grave case of those (children) leaving school to work”.
“Children should be in school,” he stressed.
Eduardo finished elementary school in 2021 and hopes to start high school next year.
According to a 2020 UNICEF report, around 55 percent of Honduran children attend lower secondary school and just over a third attend upper secondary school.
Schooling is compulsory for the first nine classes.
The number of early school leavers has skyrocketed following Covid-related school closures and the devastation caused by tropical storms Eta and Iota in November 2020, the UNICEF report said.
Eduardo dreams of becoming a “professional barber”, building a house for his mother and helping his little sister, who is now eight, open a beauty salon.
High levels of poverty and unemployment, mixed with gang and drug violence, force nearly 800 Hondurans to leave the country every day, mostly for the United States, where more than a million already live, most of them undocumented.
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