One Child's Labor Of Love

When 60 Minutes Correspondent Ed Bradley first met Craig Kielburger three years ago, the 13-year-old possessed a passionate intolerance for child labor and slavery.

Now 16, he has met with some of the most important political and religious leaders of his time. And last year, he joined the ranks of John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman, Elie Wiesel and Desmond Tutu as he took home the prestigious Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Medal of Freedom. Bradley recently revisited Craig to track his progress.

"Basically, we're told slavery [was] abolished," Craig explained. "But it was really shocking, because when I was just reading through the different research that I got, and you find the worst type of slavery still exists today - slavery of children."

When Craig was age 12, he had read a newspaper article about a boy his age in Pakistan, Iqbal Masih.

But after Iqbal won worldwide recognition, his life was cut short when, at age 12, he was shot dead in the streets of his village. No one has been convicted of the murder, and Craig vowed to keep his cause alive.

"The only way we're going to ever find out is try," he said. "So after doing some research, I just walked to my classmates and said, 'Listen, I read this article. Here's the problem. This is what I know,' which at that point was not very much. And [I] asked, 'Who wants to help?'"

Craig started a group called Free the Children. The board of directors mey Saturdays in Craig's den-turned-command center. They were in daily contact, by phone or fax, with a host of international human rights groups.

Having always done his homework to keep up on the issue, Craig soon felt that homework wasn't enough: He had to meet the children he was trying to help.

"I just wanted to learn more on the issue of child labor. I wanted to make sure that we're not imposing our Western culture on these people. I wanted to speak to the children. I wanted to hear their views, ask them, 'What do you want? How can your life be better?'" Craig said.

This prompted him to take a trip to Asia - a trip his parents were wholeheartedly against.

"We wouldn't even let him take the subway to downtown Toonto by himself, so to let him go to Asia was unthinkable," said his mother, Theresa, a schoolteacher.

Craig Kielburger at 13 was already fully immersed in advocacy work.

"The perception that I had was that in child labor, it's all in the deep, dark back alleys,Â…no one can see it; [it's] beyond public scrutiny. But the truth is, it's practiced in the open," Craig said.

He was shocked to discover that child labor did not take place just in hidden sweatshops. It was everywhere - a boy making metal cups to be shipped to hotels and restaurants, a girl bagging candy 11 hours a day in an overheated room or a boy stitching soccer balls.

Craig found himself staring into faces his age and younger - kids missing their childhood, separated from their parents, tortured for small mistakes. And in some cases, the work was life-threatening.

"One shop that I went into, I met one 8-year-old girl," Craig remembered. "She was just pulling apart syringes and needles, piece by pieceÂ…and putting them in buckets for their plastics."

"She wore no gloves, literally had no shoes," he said. "All she was doing was squatting on the ground,Â…surrounded by a pile of needles."

"They were from hospitals, from the street, from the garbage. We asked her, 'Don't you worry about AIDS and other diseases like that?' We got no response. She didn't know what they were," he continued.

"I believe that young people can make a difference, and I believe that young people, when speaking out, do have a lot of power," he added. "One of the best parts about being young is we still have our imagination. We still think we can fly; we still think we can go to the moon."

But despite all the power that Craig has acquired over the years, his parents didnÂ't want him to forget he was still a child.

"It's very important for me that he remain a child - that he enjoys his childhood, that he be able to Rollerblade, to swim, to ski, to do all those things," his mother explained.

The Kielburgers claimed theyÂ're far from activists, even describing themselves as boring. But their life was far from dull these days. The phone would rings at all hours. An uninterrupted family dinner would be a rare occasion, and good-byes were routine.

Ad while Craig admitted to sometimes feeling run down, he said he can't slow down when there's so much left to do.

"It's a lot easier to be ignorant and say, 'I don't know the problem.' But once you know that problem, once you've seen it in their eyes, then you have a responsibility to do something," he said.

"If everyone in the world could say, 'Why me?' then nothing ever would be accomplished. Why me? Because I've met those children. Because I've seen them. Why not me?" he said.

So for the past three years, Craig hasnÂ't worried about much else. And, his organization - that group of kids who used to meet in his den - has grown into the only international human rights group run by children.

"We have groups in over 25 nations," he says. "We've, for example, now run 35 schools in countries ranging from India to Nicaragua. We've established alternative sources of income projects, helping themÂ…to set up cooperatives by giving land."

Craig spends a lot of his time on the road, often alone. He is part of an individualized program that allows him to travel and keep up with his class work. He appears to be pretty popular with the kids in his class, as well as with his teachers, especially considering his record of straight As.

"I plan on going all the way through my Ph.D., so I'm going to be in school till I'm 40 or something," Craig says. "I hope to...study international conflict mediation. I've had the chance to travel to Bosnia quite a bit,...and areas of armed conflict, and to see what war does."

"I want to be involved in helping stop wars before they begin," he says.

But what about a future in politics?

"I've met too many politicians. AndÂ…it's a very noble pursuit. But I find you have to compromise, you know, too many of your morals when you enter politics," he says.

Craig has met his share of political leaders. He has been featured in pictures with the Dali Lama, the queen of England, the president and Hillary Clinton, the vice president and Tipper Gore, and even the late Mother Teresa.

"It's great meeting with them. But the only reason I do meet with them is not to get the picture taken, becauseÂ…every person's just another person," he explains.

"They're all incredibly interesting people. I enjoyed meeting all of them, but theyÂ're still not the people who impress me the most," he says.

So who does impress this teen-ager?

"In Thailand, there was a young street girl, who I handed an orange. And she automaticallyÂ…took the orange, and she peeled it, and she broke it, and she shared it with her friends," Craig says.

"Or a child who I saw in India. He was crippled," Craig says. "So his friends were carrying him from place to place, so he wouldn't be left behind."

"And to this day I'm convinced that if you took these children and put them in those positions of power, we would see this world truly e a different place," he says.

Produced by Aaron Wertheim