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Paperboys beat poverty in Kabul
By CNN correspondent Diana Muriel
KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) -- On the streets of Kabul, former street urchins sell newspapers to help their families end a life of poverty in the Afghan capital. Around 100 boys sell the English-language Kabul Weekly each week. Many are important breadwinners for their families. Abdul Mokum,14, is one of a small army of boys that sell the newspaper in the capital. Abdul arrives with dozens of other boys to help put the pages together at the publication's headquarters -- and pick up the number of copies he thinks he can sell. Around 8,000 copies are printed every week -- on sale for around 50 cents, the boys buy them at a 15 percent discount. On the street they charge what they can get. Despite the competition, Abdul is among the most successful. "I have customers, westerners and Afghans. When they see me they buy from me -- like this guy, he comes to me to buy his newspapers," Abdul told CNN. Abdul makes around four dollars a day from his labours. In a country where a rural worker's wage can be as little as 30 cents a day, it is an important contribution to his family's income. Abdul lives with his parents and five other brothers and sisters in a poor part of the city. Both his mother and father have jobs, but his father has not been paid for his work at the Ministry of Defence for seven months. Before selling the newspaper Abdul was a street kid running wild. The paper's director of distribution, Gulbaddin El-ham, says boys like him have helped to push up sales.
"In the beginning we only printed around 2,500 copies. "We're an independent company and have to pay everything for ourselves. So we went to the schools and to a charity that looked after street kids -- they go to school half the day and sell newspapers the other half," El-ham explained. The publication resumed production in January after having been closed down by the Taliban. Since then sales have increased from 2,500 to 8,000. When Abdul does not have homework, he says, he practices his language skills using the newspaper -- a very different education on the streets than the one he was getting before.
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