KHARTOUM -

For long hours, the Sudanese waited in front of their mobile phones, closely following the rescue of a ten-year-old child, after he was swallowed by a garbage cart while he was working on a daily garbage collection mission, in the city of Bahri, north of Khartoum.

Despite the success of the rescue teams in removing the child, Majed Mubarak Ibrahim, from the car this morning, Tuesday, and transferring him to a nearby hospital to follow up his health conditions, where his condition was described as stable;

The anger was present in the social platforms towards what was described as the bad environments in which children and cleaners work in the capital and the states in general.

A cartoon about the incident of the Sudanese child who was swallowed by the garbage cart (social networking sites)

They knew him from his little hand

The story told on social media platforms says that a mobile garbage cart in the Central Station area of ​​Bahri dragged the working child into its warehouse, while he was struggling to stuff the garbage bags in its hollow, without realizing that it would turn into a prey for the automatic gears inside.

The accompanying cleaning crew learned about the accident when the child waved his small hand, then rescue operations began in a race against time and fear that he would die as a result of suffocation from lack of air and emissions of harmful gases.

Rescue operations began - according to eyewitnesses - using simple tools, in an attempt to open a way into the dump truck's warehouse.

However, these attempts were unable to compete with the extremely hard reinforced iron, and a second stage began in which a digger used a bulldozer, so that the latter succeeded in opening the locks of the cart, all the way to the detained child.

As soon as he was released after a long operation that lasted 8 hours, the child was taken to an ambulance stationed near the scene of the incident, which took him to the nearby Bahri Hospital.

Observers of the child's condition said that he got out of the car in a deplorable condition, and later it was confirmed that his health was stable after he was transferred to the hospital.

In the wake of this incident, social media activists criticized the phenomenon of child labor, describing their going out to work as a crime that should stop immediately.

Some commentators have pointed out the need for the most severe penalties to be imposed on those involved in the "baby car crime" (as it is called on Twitter), or in the employment of children in general.

Others demanded the importance of providing safety tools and improving work environments, especially for cleaners.

The incident of this #child_waste_cart is imposed, in addition to shedding light on the crime of child labor, it is supposed to reopen the case of #Khartoum_cleaning_workers and their just demands represented in: pic.twitter.com/PYCFwmjv66

— ⳣⲱⳣⲁ Giga 🇸🇩 (@1Giga23) February 15, 2022

Politics is present

The Sudanese have thrown politics into the "garbage cart child" issue, with some of them blaming the state and its policies for turning children into laborers in order to cut costs.

Another group went to call on advocates to stop child labor with "consistency" in their claims, and also called for the criminalization of children's participation in protest movements against the existing authority.

Sudanese believe that ending the phenomenon of child labor begins with the strict application of laws, and the return of children's institutions to effectively play their roles.

However, other participants acknowledge the difficulty of preventing child labor, in light of the deteriorating economic conditions that push families to remove their children from education and push them into the labor market.

The inflation rate in Sudan reached 359.58 percent last December, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, in light of a continuous rise in the prices of goods and services.

A report issued by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimated the number of school-age Sudanese children who are out of school;

3 million boys and girls.