Hey everyone, this is your brand spanking new first year rep about to make his debut blog post so please bear with me. Since all this is pretty much new to me, I figured I'll just wet my feet a bit and post this depressing video of child labour (it was very depressing for me =( )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8ajmDxRHZQ

This video was compiled by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and after some more digging I found some additional stats from their site:

• Globally, 1 in 6 children work
• 218 million children aged 5 - 17 are involved in child labour world wide
• 126 million children work in hazardous conditions
• The highest numbers of child labourers are in the Asia/Pacific region, where there are 122 million working children
• The highest proportion of child labourers is in Sub Saharan Africa, where 26% of children (49 million) are involved in work.

Check that out.. 218 million children are involved in child labour world wide. That's like... (gets calculator) almost 7 times the population of Canada!! The thing to remember is that some of these children are lured by the prospects of job opportunities which they can't afford to ignore if they want to put food on the family's table. Unfortunately, child labour is merely the tip of an enormous iceberg of a whole slew of child rights problems that are common today: child soldiers, physical/sexual abuse, child refugees, substandard education just to name a few. As an FTCer, this was a good wake up call for me to continue pushing forwards in our goals and I hope it's done the same for you. All right, that's all the spiel I've got to share for now, I'm looking forward to continuing work with you guys in the future and you're all awesome. Peacee

Daniel