Where are they now?

This report about the current condition of former child camel jockeys is pretty depressing:

Moosa, 15, was six when he began racing camels in the Gulf.

His career ended at the age of 13 when he was permanently injured from a thrashing he received after losing a race. A chunk of his thigh had to be cut away after a wound from the beating became gangrenous.

"The pain is always with me," Moosa said.

Moosa is one of 600 boys, some as young as seven, repatriated in 2006 as a result of pressure by rights groups and the United States on Gulf Arab governments to act against child trafficking, especially of young boys sent to work as camel jockeys.

While the story clearly lays out how bad things were for these boys while they were racing, things aren't going that swimmingly for them now:

For Moosa, it has been a return to the poverty of his mud and brick home in Chachraan, a village in Pakistan's rural southern Punjab province.

"What are these children going to do now. We already live hand-to-mouth and there is no work for us," Moosa's frail father says, while sitting on a wooden stretcher in a dimly lit room.

And the future may not be that good either:

The UAE has eradicated the use of child jockeys, though the problem persists elsewhere in the Gulf, including Kuwait, according to Zubair Shad, director of a project run with UNICEF to help rehabilitate child jockeys.

"We have sent a report to UNICEF drawing its attention to the situation in Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia," Shad said from his office in Punjab's capital of Lahore.

There are fears that some parents and rogue agents will send kids back to places where rules banning child jockeys are lax.

rtwt