Hard labour for small boy

This morning a few Thai fishing vessels showed up on the horizon. We launched our fast rescue craft and proceeded to them. We went alongside this relative small vessel and it appeared that they had a crew of at least 18 men of which one of them was the small boy on this picture doing the same hard labour as all the other crewmembers on deck. All theses nets, full with fish are hauled on board by hand. I guessed that the boy was not older than 11 years. One of the crewmembers, who spoke a little english, told me that he was no good at school and that he therefore had to work. But work and this work is something completely different, I told him. "That's his own fault" he told me, "if he could learn better, he would not be here".