Matters of play

As you read this sentence, there is a child, eight years old, toiling in a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His father works alongside him, equipped only with hand tools; his mother is dead. The child is responsible for collecting and transporting large amounts of the extracted, cobalt-laden rocks around the mine and to the local trader. He is paid by the sack and, lacking any knowledge of the value of the mineral that he is trading, he has to accept whatever the trader pays him, which often amounts to 11 cents per day. The trader then takes these minerals to a buyer who does not care nor ask where the cobalt comes from. As the mineral moves up the supply chain