Eduardo Espinal runs his own barber shop from a small zinc-roofed building in Honduras, opening the doors at 8am for a 12-hour workday.
He is 12 years old.
When it is quiet, he plays hide-and-seek or soccer with his friends. He has not been to school since last year.
Photo: AFP
Although it is illegal in Honduras for children under 14 to work, Eduardo is one of tens of thousands who do so in the poverty and crime-plagued Central American country.
Last year, more than one in 10 Honduran children aged five to 18 were working, said Horacio Lovo of the INE national statistics institute.
Half a million of the country’s 2.3 million children neither worked nor went to school.
“I really like the barbershop and to study too,” Eduardo told reporters outside his “Eduar Barber Shop,” which he opened last month on the outskirts of Comayagua in central Honduras.
He charges between US$2 and US$3 per cut, depending on the style.
On his best day to date, he earned US$45 — a small fortune in a country where one-third of the population of nearly 10 million people live on less than US$1 a day.
Eduardo’s father, Wilfredo Espinal, 50, makes a meager living collecting river sand to sell to builders. His mother, Merlin Carranza, does not work.
The boy said that he wanted to help his family, so he started working as an apprentice last year, aged just 11, at the barbershop where he and his father had their hair cut.
His father bought him a set of shears, with which he practiced at home.
A month ago, Eduardo told his father: “Daddy, I can cut, I want you to buy me a [barber’s] chair,” Wilfredo Espinal told reporters.
The father obliged, taking out a loan to purchase the chair as well as the scissors, razor and other equipment, and helped the boy set up shop in a small building that used to belong to Eduardo’s grandmother.
On a normal day, “I get up, I bathe, I get dressed, I eat and I come here” to the shop, the boy said.
“I play when I don’t have customers,” he said.
Eduardo’s example is a “serious case of those [children] who leave school in order to work,” Lovo said.
“Children should be in school,” he added.
Eduardo finished primary school last year and hopes to start high school next year.
Eduardo dreams of becoming a “professional barber,” to build a home for his mother and help his little sister, now eight, open a beauty salon.
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