City Upon a Hill of Scraps: Surviving on Scavenging in Iraq
Share with others:
BAGHDAD -- At the bottom of the economy here, life revolves around that humblest of commodities, garbage.
On a recent morning, Hamad Tarish dropped down a bag of cans and scrap metal, showing off blackened hands that rarely touched running water. For Mr. Tarish, 22, garbage is his capital. Every night around 3 a.m. he leaves his home to scavenge in a neighborhood to the south before the sanitation trucks come, hustling to avoid the police and to compete with other collectors.
In front of a stretch of makeshift cinder-block houses he threw his haul onto a scale. Seventeen pounds of aluminum cans, worth $6. A hunk of scrap metal and a pound of wire from which he had burned the rubber insulation, each good for $2. In all, $10 to buy food for himself, his wife and their two children.
For Mr. Tarish, who said he usually earned about $4 a day, it was a good harvest. Tomorrow might not be as good, he said. You could never tell. His eyes were bloodshot, his limbs hung heavy with exhaustion.
"A kilogram of meat is $15," he said. "It's impossible. I don't buy sugar for tea."
As Iraq's economy languishes, Mr. Tarish has found his livelihood in an underground economy that sustains and organizes whole neighborhoods. Around him were his fellow foot soldiers in this new marketplace -- the nocturnal scavengers, the middlemen who bought the scrap for cents on the pound, the dirty horse-drawn carts bringing in more debris from more remote parts of the city. And around these were piles and piles of garbage, sorted by type and swarmed over by flies.
"People here are living on garbage and animals," said Ali Hasun, 27, a middleman, gesturing around him at a horizon of improvised houses pressed one against another as far as the eye could see -- a midsize city subsisting on refuge.
Mr. Hasun is a father of four. Like others, he said he would like a regular job but could not find one. Some days he earns as much as $20, other days, nothing.
"Before it was embarrassing to let other people see us buying garbage," he said. "We are young and care how we look. But after a while you forget." And besides, he added, noting the brisk trade going on all around him, everybody else was doing it, too.
First Published January 12, 2011 12:01 am
