| Summary: | In Ghana, children as young as three and as old as sixteen are often sent away from home to work in bondage for small payments, desperately needed by impoverished families. Some are given away by aunts, uncles, grandparents, or by their own overburdened mothers who will have one less mouth to feed and the equivalent of $40 (U.S.) each year. Others send their children away to learn a skill or as a means of discipline. The parents are often ignorant of the circumstances their children will face: brutal back-breaking and dangerous labor, utter deprivation even to the point of starvation, and exposure to parasites. Under the River follows one non-governmental organization's efforts to investigate and rescue trafficked children from bonded labor and return them to their parents. Many parents barely recognize their children and wonder how they can possibly afford to care for additional children. As for the children, it is apparent at these awkward reunions that they have little recollection of their families and friends. It is also apparent that they are in danger of being re-trafficked. Child trafficking leaves behind a wake of fractured families and is a tragedy of immense proportions. As for the NGO and the American family which sponsored the program, the rescuing of the children isn t quite the resolution they had hoped for.
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