VnExpress - January 5, 2023 | 03:25 pm GMT+7
Tran Huu HiepEconomist, legal expert
I have kept hoping
for the moment when Thai Ly Hao Nam would be taken out of the concrete pillar:
he would be wounded, he would have lost consciousness, but above all, he would
still be alive.
But that was only my
imagination.
All hope was lost on
Wednesday evening, when the authorities of Dong Thap Province announced that
Nam had died.
Dong Thap's Deputy
Chairman Doan Tan Buu said that a team of medical and forensics experts and
local authorities concluded that the boy had died based on various factors,
including the location of the accident, the depth of the pillar, the length of
time the rescue attempt had gone on, and possible injuries the boy was believed
to have suffered.
At the time of this
writing, the pillar that Nam had gotten stuck in had yet to be excavated for a
number of technical reasons.
 |
|
Rescuers at the site
where Thai Ly Hao Nam falls into a concrete pillar, January 3, 2022. Photo by
VnExpress/Hoang Nam |
A colleague had asked me:
"What if just now, all of a sudden, the boy appeared because he had been
trapped in some other corner of the site, and had never fallen into that
pillar? Could that be possible? How could it be that he had fallen right into
that pillar?"
However, security camera
footage at the site does not support her theory.
The 10-year-old boy, who
weighed just over 20kg, had fallen into the hollow concrete pillar which has a
diameter of just 25cm and a depth of 35m.
The unexpected accident
took place when he was at the construction site of a bridge.
The failed rescue attempt
has exposed the wide-spread neglect of safety protocols commonly seen at
construction sites in Vietnam and it put into question the rescue effort, which
was quite basic, confusing, and late to the scene of the accident.
After the rescue attempt
came to an end, the authorities have a lot of work to do to find out the cause
of the accident, determine the responsibilities of the parties involved, and to
carry out humanitarian work to comfort the spirit of Hao Nam. And in my
opinion, the most important thing is to find a solution to limit the dangers
that are stalking children.
Ten days before Nam
slipped and fell into the pillar on December 31, a five-year-old girl had the
same accident in Dong Nai Province.
She was fortunate,
however. She was saved 20 minutes after falling into the 15-meter-deep concrete
pillar.
Others have not been as
lucky. Several years ago, a seven-year-old boy died after falling into an
irrigation ditch at a construction site in Dong Nai Province.
Not long ago, two children
aged four and five in central Binh Dinh Province were killed after they fell
into an irrigation ditch at a construction site.
Those cases are just a few
among the hundreds of thousands of accidents happening to children every year
in Vietnam.
Data from the Health
Environment Management Agency under the Ministry of Health said an average of
370,000 children in Vietnam have accidents every year. Of these, 6,600 die,
accounting for 35.5% of the total number of children who die from all causes.
Behind the pain of Nam and
his family, are many more stories of pitiful children we need to pay attention
to.
Dong Thap is not the only
locality in the Mekong Delta where children are out on the streets and working
to earn money. In this region, it is not difficult to find school-aged children
struggling to make a living doing all kinds of jobs, from working as servers in
restaurants to doing housework for families, selling lottery tickets and
picking up scraps, as Nam was doing.
The 10-year-old boy was at
the construction site of the bridge along with three other children who were
his neighbors searching for pieces of iron to sell to scrap vendors.
The story of why he did
that makes me feel a pang of pain. His mother said he wanted to join a martial
art class and that the fee of VND60,000 (US$2.56) a month was more than his
parents could afford. Nam was left with no choice but to pick up scraps and
sell them to earn the money he needed. By the time the accident happened, he
had earned VND21,000.
The direct and conspicuous
cause for accidents that involve children is mostly carelessness and a failure
to comply with safety protocols.
Still, I think, it is
necessary to look at the root cause of the problem: poverty.
The Mekong Delta is one of
the poorest regions in the nation, with only 11.4% of people over 15 having
jobs. The ratio of students dropping out of high-school in the delta is almost
three times higher than that of the national level.
Difficult economic
conditions and the high cost of education are the main reasons why students
drop out of school early in the region.
Meanwhile, there is a
serious lack of job options in the region, the nation's agriculture hub,
causing most people to leave for Ho Chi Minh City and neighboring areas such as
Dong Nai and Binh Duong to work in the industrial, commercial, and service
sectors.
Many couples have had to
let their children stay back in the delta with their relatives while they had
to find jobs elsewhere. In several cases that I have witnessed, the children
left behind do not even go to school and there is no one there to protect or
watch out for them.
Being pushed to the edge
by poverty is not a story that only happens in Vietnam. We can also see this in
other low- or middle-income countries.
India used to be shaken by
the deaths of children falling into abandoned wells, manholes or poorly covered
concrete piles, prompting the authorities to urgently issue a series of
documents to tighten safety regulations regarding drilled wells. Meanwhile, the
country's media simultaneously warned about the need to ensure the rights of
children and to improve the quality of their lives, reducing the number of
instances where children wander for food or play in unsafe areas.
In Vietnam, construction
sites are extremely attractive to poor children in rural and remote areas. It
is a strange world for them, full of curious things to play with, and
especially, full of things that could be picked up for sale, in comparison to
barren fields that have nothing to offer.
The "if only"
exclamations of adults will always be too slow for the lives of poor children.
Nam's death awakens the
whole society to one core thing: children deserve the right to be educated in
schools and to play in a safe environment instead of struggling to make a
living.
*Tran Huu Hiep has a
Doctorate in Economics and is the deputy chairman of the Mekong Delta Tourism
Association.
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