Liberia Rock

Pastor Dan Schoepf shot this video while performing missionary work in Liberia, Africa. The children work 4 hours to fill a 5-gallon bucket with gravel. They are able to redeem the bucket for $0.50. These children are able to fill 2 buckets in a day's work. They are among the 100 million who live on less than a $1 a day.
Paul Krugman in his micoreconomics textbook writes that children in the Philippines scavenger piles of trash for morsels of food. These children have to brush away flies and maggots to earn the equivalent of a $1 a day.
Dan performed church services at a church nearby this rock quarry. He had the opportunity to interview one of the workers you see in the video. The worker was thankful that the village was built around this rock so they would always have food.
Some in the US would object to child labor, but as this video shows, the alternative would be starvation. In his book co-authored with Ben Bernanke, Robert Frank asks, "Are these people poor because they do all of the work themselves or do they perform all the work because they are poor?"