Voices from the Mines: Exploring the Untold Stories of Child Labor

Education

This study explored the lived experiences, challenges, coping mechanisms, insights, and suggested support programs of Senior High School students who were engaged in small-scale mining while continuing their education in Monkayo, Davao de Oro. A qualitative phenomenological design was used to understand how mining work shaped the informants’ schooling, health, emotional well-being, relationships, and aspirations. Data were gathered through semi-structured in-depth interviews with ten purposively selected student-miners from selected public secondary schools and were analyzed through thematic analysis. The findings showed that the informants performed physically demanding and hazardous tasks, including carrying heavy sacks, digging for ore-bearing rocks, spalling, preparing work areas, and assisting with mining equipment. Their daily lives were marked by difficult choices between earning for the family and attending school, limited rest, exposure to accidents, and unsafe tunnel conditions. They experienced injuries, body pain, fatigue, respiratory difficulties, absenteeism, unfinished requirements, social isolation, stigma, stress, and a painful sense of losing childhood. They coped through self-initiated safety practices, peer support, perseverance, time management, assistance from classmates and teachers, positive thinking, prayer, and emotional release. Despite these hardships, the informants viewed education as their strongest hope for safer work and a better future. They recommended flexible learning arrangements, scholarships, school supplies, counseling, skills training, livelihood programs for parents, financial assistance, youth programs, community monitoring, and stronger child-labor awareness. The study emphasized that reducing child labor in mining communities required coordinated educational, economic, psychosocial, and community-based responses that listened to the voices of working children.

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