From a distance, Hadi looks like a ten year-old boy; misery has dwarfed him. He wears shabby clothes to protect his skin from the limestone shower around him, still, his dark skin is covered white. Cheap glasses protect him from blindness. A few days ago he turned 15 but his fifty peers are not playmates, rather workmates in the quarry, like thousands of other children working in around 500 quarries on the western bank.
From a distance, Hadi looks like a ten year-old boy; misery has dwarfed him. He wears shabby clothes to protect his skin from the limestone shower around him, still, his dark skin is covered white. Cheap glasses protect him from blindness. A few days ago he turned 15 but his fifty peers are not playmates, rather workmates in the quarry, like thousands of other children working in around 500 quarries on the western bank.
“I work as an assistant during the phase of turning the quarry powder into blocks,” he says. “I work 12 hours and get L.E. 50 (US $8) a day. I left school a year ago and my father is ill and in hospital. Even though my elder sister graduated from university, she doesn’t have a job.”
During the pharaohs’ era, crossing the Nile to its western bank in Upper Egypt was connected with the death journey. The dead moved in a funeral procession to the eternal sunset where the graveyards of this civilization lie. The mountains of the western bank between Asyut and Minya have become the treasure of a capitalism that denies children innocence.
Hadi coughs badly and spits phlegm of dust. When asked about his health, Hadi says he was well, in an attempt to hold on to an early manhood in front of the adults.
But Said Ibrahim interrupted him: “It is not true, we are dying slowly here. We are all suffering from respiratory diseases and in danger of going blind because of the powder.
“Many of us die under the cutting machines teeth which often got loose and cut workers into two. We often get shocks from the uncovered high-tension cables.”
Hadi says the owner used to distribute milk and new gloves, shoes and glasses whenever he came. “But nobody cares about us now,” he says.
“Education doesn’t do any good”
The right to mine the western bank quarries belongs to a group of investors, some of them represent big names in the drug industry or own construction materials factories who get monopoly contracts from the armed forces which legally own all these mountains. “Nobody comes from the labour office. Three of us died last year,” says Abdullah, Hadi’s friend.
“The quarry owner took the compensation but he didn’t give it to their parents. It’s true that death is God’s will, but our parents have at least the right to get the compensation when we die, don’t they?”
“There are neither syndicates nor civil organizations,” Hadi said. “Every once in a while, a journalist like you comes, asks the same questions and then leaves. I left school because education didn’t do my sister any good. She spent two years looking for a job but in vain. I was in 8th grade. I don’t attend school; I just take the exams and pass them. I pay some money for the absence. My family won’t make a living through education. The revolution has caused problems between the people and the military. It may be the reason for hiring my cousin but the number of thugs and thieves rose. You say that the people and the army are one but the army takes tributes to allow us reach the quarries. Of course, I’d like to go back to school and become an engineer providing that I find a respectable job after graduation. If the revolution employs my sister and treats my father, I will leave the mountain. I’d like to play again with my friends in the town.”
