Every day at sunset, ten-year-old Saber embarks on a risky journey with his friends in the night’s darkness. Saber spends hours trekking in the barren bush around his village in Qasr al-Mahadna, (in southeastern Tunisia) to hunt scorpions. He directs his flashlight at the animal to paralyze it, then he carefully picks it up with a pair of tweezers and puts it in a tin and continues his journey to find more deadly creatures, which are very much in demand.
Every day at sunset, ten-year-old Saber embarks on a risky journey with his friends in the night’s darkness. Saber spends hours trekking in the barren bush around his village in Qasr al-Mahadna, (in southeastern Tunisia) to hunt scorpions. He directs his flashlight at the animal to paralyze it, then he carefully picks it up with a pair of tweezers and puts it in a tin and continues his journey to find more deadly creatures, which are very much in demand.
“Though they are dangerous,” says Saber, “they are a small treasure that helps me help my family.” He says he gives what he earns from selling scorpions every week to his father. The price of one scorpion is less than one Tunisian dinar ($ 0.25).
Despite the risky roads, the children of southern Bani Khedash catch scorpions wearing tattered clothes without any tools to protect them from the scorpions’ stings or the scorching hot sun to collect for school supplies.
This phenomenon has become a source of concern for civil society activists who fear for the lives of these impoverished children. Jamal Lamloumi, a civil activist, says: “Catching scorpions poses an increasing danger on the children’s lives.”
Lamloumi says that catching scorpions has become a tradition that is passed from fathers to sons in poor and marginalized communities.
Mohamed, a father who is proud of teaching his son this profession, says: “Catching scorpions in this area, though risky, represents one of the area’s livelihoods, especially for children in the hot weather where scorpions are rife.”
Another man who taught his 14 year-old son son, Belkasem, how to catch scorpions, is not worried about his son getting stung: “I do not think it is that dangerous. Children learn catching scorpions at an early age and they are good at avoiding their stings.”
The children track the scorpions’ footprints under the hot sun, which forces the creatures out of their hiding places. However, now, the children of Bani Khedash spend long hours at night searching for scorpions using cheap, Chinese flashlights.
Malek Mahdawi, 14, speaks about catching hundreds of venomous scorpions at night under the dim moonlight, stressing that he catches almost a hundred every day. He puts them in bags and sells them at the end of each week to the scorpion collector who, in turn, sells them to the Pasteur Institute for Research in Tunis to extract venom and sell it to drug factories.