By Mohamed T. Massaquoi
For a large number of Sierra Leone`s children, survival depends on how much they can scavenge. Evidence of this is a common sight almost everywhere in the country. Recently, I saw it live at play in Bo, the southern district headquarter town.
Those kids make their living by collecting used cans and bottles on the streets. A group of over twenty of them, within the age brackets of nine and twelve, both girls and boys, walking along the government hospital quarters towards the SLPP regional office construction site, where an official sod-turning ceremony was been held. Each of them held a plastic bag containing some quantity of empty cans and bottles. As they approached our direction, they suddenly raced for the nearby gutters to collect what I later learned were empty cans of alcoholic and soft drinks.
The children rushed on the priced materials like hungry eagles on a prey. It was disheartening to see that the prediction made by Charles Darwin for survival was already true with our kids in this 21st century.
“[In the] struggle for existence…the stronger you are the longer you survive,” the theory goes.
One of the kids, Fatmata Mansaray (not her real name), eleven, narrated her story. The cans, she explained, are recycled and used to make cooking pots. Fifty of them earn her Le 4, 000 and when she is lucky to gather so much, she takes the money home to her mother who supplements proceeds of their cooked cassava and beans business.
Fatmata told Politico that she had to get up from bed the moment the cock crows to do some domestic work, before setting out for town. She returns home late in the night.
The young girl lamented that it`s always very difficult for her to get the Le4, 000 as she has to compete with boys who are stronger than her.
With Fatmata on that day was twelve year old Small Charley, who said he was in class six.
Charley said he`d been in the business for a long time and had no idea when it would end. He said his mother had been a volunteer primary school teacher and could only get money during school days. This is what he had to do in order to complement her effort, the young boy said. Part of the money is used to purchase ‘garri’ (pounded cassava, a delicacy in West Africa). Charley said he buys it in large quantity to be able to share with the other members of his family at home.
For this young boy, there has been a good side to his trade, even if daunting and unpredictable. He said because of the daily walkabout, he has got to know so much about Bo Town.
Sorrowfully though, Charley did not know his father. He said his mother had only been telling him that his father was a police officer in Freetown and that he didn’t have time to come home to them.
The boy`s story represents a growing list of child-headed families in deprived part of the country. Bo District is obviously one of them. Home to the second largest city after Freetown, Bo is also home to the popular Ngondama which used to serve as refugee camp during the 1991-2002 civil war. It is now a scene of child labour, hosting many children who engage in sand mining in the Sewa River. Most of them live under foster care, having lost their parents to the war.
The stories are almost the same across the country. In my base in Pujehun District, for instance, children are mostly engaged in selling fire wood, fishing as well as sand mining. There have been several reports of drowning at the River Wanjei, which is the largest river in the district and the major one where sand mining occurs.
Wanjei`s status as source of sand and consequently economic livelihoods for the community people also means a huge section of the district is under constant threats of flooding, as we saw last October when over 100 houses were flooded.
Women, because of their trademark poverty, are mostly engaged in sand mining in this area, leaving their children vulnerable to drowning.
According to those involved in the mining, they sell the sand to a range of people but mostly to people who build guest houses and local NGOs who wants to erect their offices. This way all these people who should know better contribute to a phenomenon that requires everyone`s attention.
But importantly, all this brings to question the rationale behind the formation of the Ministry of Social Welfare, Gender and Children Affairs. Add this to the growing, grim statistics of abuse against children, girls and women, and the result is grimmer.
The only difference between Sierra Leone today and the country before and during the civil war is the silence of the guns. The suffering of the people seems everlasting.
Most of the kids I met back in Bo were barefooted, a clear demonstration of their susceptibility to all kinds of contagious diseases.
But stories abound of similar cases of children in urban settings like Freetown. And come to think of it, if children in the cities, under the nose of the government, could live life in such squalid conditions, what can the children in these far-flung areas say.
© Politico 21/04/15
