Garbage sustains Afghan ‘ragpickers’

LAHORE, Pakistan | Six-year-old Ali Reza Khan spots a half-eaten apple and steps toward it, darting when another boy makes his move. In one quick swoop, he picks it up, wipes it with a soiled sleeve and takes a bite.

It’s 7:30 a.m. at the city garbage dump, and the hunt is on.

Several truckloads of refuse soon arrive, and Ali tosses aside the rind to join a frenzy of Afghan children who depend on the bounty hidden within each steaming mound to support themselves and their families.

Known locally as “ragpickers,” most were born in Pakistan after their parents fled the violence and economic hardships that continue to worsen across the border.

Pakistan’s own economy is on the brink as the government seeks an emergency infusion of cash from foreign donors, but the country remains home to 1.8 million Afghan refugees seven years after the overthrow of the Taliban.

Despite the filth on which these children tread, most insist they are better off mining trash for money than going home.

“I don’t want to do this all my life, but right now I have no choice. There is no work in Afghanistan,” said Naqibullah Ullah, 14, peering from beneath a red Dale Earnhardt sports cap.

By some estimates, Pakistan’s large cities have as many as 25,000 ragpickers, perhaps 70 percent younger than 18. The vast majority are young Afghans like Naqibullah, who has plied the same waste patch along the Ravi River for five years.

Not long after he was born at a camp outside the southwest border town of Quetta, his family migrated to Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city, in search of better prospects.

His father died of an illness three years ago, leaving him to look after his mother, two younger brothers and a sister who now accompany him on his daily rounds.

From dawn till dusk, 700 to 800 dump trucks rumble into the site spilling trash and belching smoke. The children typically spend six to eight hours a day scavenging on behalf of junk buyers, who pay 3 rupees, the equivalent of 4 cents, per pound for glass, 8 rupees for paper, and up to 10 rupees for polyethylene bags, the scraps of choice.

Naqibullah swears it’s possible to earn nearly $5 in a 12-hour stretch if the pickings are prime and his legs hold out, though on average he earns about $1.25.

Although this involves sorting through shards of glass, rotten meat and hospital waste, the scavenging nets up to $40 a month, what some low-level laborers and domestic servants here earn.

At the end of the workday, Naqibullah and his siblings walk five minutes on foot to their squat — a tarp enclosure inside the walls of a half-built brick compound. Outside, his mother, Fatima, serves a dinner of bread and lentils around a small fire. Mounds of old shoes and plastic bottles fill the yard.

Khalid Butt, an instructor at Government College in Lahore who has spent the past year researching the Afghan ragpickers, said they are “specialized in their job” since they are free to make their own hours and be among their own people, and still make enough to get by.

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