When the price of a job is a broken home

Somewhere in Sri Lanka there is a little girl getting the best education money can buy. She's academically gifted and won a scholarship to the country's top fee-paying school. The scholarship pays half her fees and her mother pays the rest, plus the cost of her uniform and books. She's a cleaner, 3,500 kilometers away in Dubai. In fact, she was my cleaner while I lived there.

She, too, is bright but Sri Lanka's political upheavals ended her schooldays when she was 11. So she is now a migrant worker, separated from her husband and child. Just like 232 million others around the globe, according to the United Nations, and that is more than 3 percent of the world's population.

I've been thinking about her a lot this week, after the apparent suicide of four children in their village in Guizhou province. Their father was away working, their mother had left, and their deaths are a pointless tragedy. Meanwhile, everyone is rightly demanding better supervision of these "children left behind" because they are paying the price of the economic pressures that mean so many parents have to leave home to get a job.