Such the Wise Guy

He was a normal 12-year-old kid, a kid who loved soccer and devoured the comics page every morning with his breakfast cereal. But then one day, Craig Kielburger read Page 1 instead.

He read about a boy his own age on the other side of the world, in Pakistan. At 4, Iqbal Masih had been sold into bondage as a carpet weaver. He escaped six years later to become a living symbol of the evils of child labor. He won a number of international honors before he was murdered in Lahore in April 1995.

Up until that moment, “I didn’t know what Pakistan was on the world map,” Craig said. “I knew nothing about the world in which millions of children my own age were living.” But reading Iqbal’s story “forever changed my life,” turning Craig into an activist who organized an international youth movement called Free the Children to end child exploitation, raised a Web page and traveled the world to bring attention to his cause. Last week, Craig traveled here to receive the same Reebok Youth-in-Action award Iqbal had earned two years earlier.

Iqbal’s story “just struck a chord with him,” said Craig’s father, Fred Kielburger. “It wasn’t right. He read about Iqbal and he said, ‘Why is this child dead?’ ”

Craig Kielburger--a skinny kid who has not yet started to shave, whose idea of an attractive business ensemble is a soccer jersey and jeans--made it his business to find out. The vast gap between his own comfortable life as the younger son of two teachers in a suburb of Toronto and the ravaged existence of Iqbal Masih gnawed at him. To his horror, he learned that many of the soccer balls he and his friends played with had been stitched by kids his own age, working in despotic conditions around the globe.

“I was looking at my life, and I was looking at his,” Craig explained. “I kept thinking that slavery was abolished. I kept thinking it was something out of the 18th century. But when I looked into it, it turned out it wasn’t an isolated incident at all.”

Soon Craig was sharing his information and his passion with his friends and classmates. He brandished a report from the International Labor Organization showing that more than 250 million 5- to 14-year-olds are working in developing countries around the world. He displayed data from the United Nations labor agency revealing that child trafficking, prostitution, slave labor and debt bondage are on the rise. The developed world isn’t immune to such indignities, either, he found, noting that one in four children in the United States lives in poverty--many in “drug-ridden neighborhoods where they fear for their lives.”

Together, Craig and his friends launched a Web site (https://www.freethechildren.org/) devoted to raising awareness about child labor. When they learned of a protest by a group of indentured children in India, they took the name for their fledgling advocacy group from the chant the young people called out as they marched through Delhi: Free the Children!

Within months of reading about Iqbal Masih’s death, Craig was addressing a U.S. congressional committee. He persuaded the Canadian government to ban the sale of fireworks manufactured by children. He spoke to his country’s Parliament and was offered a part-time job by the Canadian government. He turned it down, believing he could be more effective on the outside.

“He was moved to actions that would be unusual, to say the least, in a mature adult,” said Paul Fireman, chief executive officer of Reebok. “In a 12-year-old boy it is astonishing.”

As part of his research, Craig informed his parents that he needed to go to Asia on a fact-finding mission. They reminded him that at 12, he was not allowed to ride the subway to downtown Toronto by himself. Six months later, he found himself a chaperon and issued a plea to travel to India, Pakistan and Thailand, among other countries. His parents took a deep breath and said OK.

By chance, Craig and his crew arrived in Pakistan on the same day as Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien. In the fashion of any self-confident 12-year-old, Craig asked if it would be possible to meet with the prime minister. When he was turned down, Craig gathered up a group of street kids and called a news conference. Suddenly, the prime minister was scheduling a meeting with Craig, who admonished Chretien to take action against child labor and sex tourism. The Canadian government has since changed its criminal code to prosecute Canadians who sexually exploit children abroad.

Craig visited factories where children younger than 10 were pouring molten metal with no protective garments. He met kiddie cane cutters in Haiti, young people wielding dangerous machetes for pennies a day so kids like Craig Kielburger could have sugar for their breakfast cereal.

Outraged by these dismal circumstances, Craig was nonetheless bowled over by the kindness and camaraderie he encountered among so many child workers. “If you hand an orange to a street girl in Brazil, she will automatically break it and divide it among her friends,” he said.

Adults, Craig has decided, are perhaps not so reliable: “I simply do not believe that the adults of the world can put a man on the moon or invent the atom bomb and cannot free the children of the world.”

Now that he’s turned 13, Craig said he is not sure how long his work with Free the Children will continue. He plans to go to medical school and to affiliate with a group such as Doctors Without Borders.

Meanwhile, a public speaking course helped turn him into a mesmerizing orator. Still, he said, “people will sometimes look at me and say, ‘You’re only 13 years old. People 13 years old, they don’t do stuff like this.’ ”

That kind of attitude confounds Craig. “Why is it that adults are surprised when children get involved in social problems? I hate to say it, but the drug dealers on the streets don’t underestimate the abilities of children. We really are capable of doing more things than playing video games, eating pizza and hanging around malls.”

Kielburger paused. “Don’t get me wrong,” he demurred. “I love doing those things.”