Bomeh Inc.: Shit for Sale:: A Profile of the Sierra Leone Informal Economy (V)

Dr. Umaru Bah, CEO

DataWise (SL) Ltd.

@DataWiseSL

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Kingtom Bomeh Landfill: Barren tree surrounded by salvaged plastic ready for haulage.A pig-pen of salvaged corrugated iron at top left. Raw sewage pond at mid-right, off-camera. Part of the Ebola burial plot just over the fence at Kingtom Cemetery, off-camera.  

Africell headquarters sits atop the highest hill in Wilberforce. At least that’s what it looks like, viewed from afar in the Kingtom Bomeh refuse landfill. Its skyscraping height makes it an unavoidable landmark. As does its distinct yellow n-shaped exterior plating. The building enjoys the company of many international development agency offices. And a couple of other government agencies. And the residences of many expats: Most pay top dollars—or euros or pounds—for the sea view and the commanding panorama. And the seclusion.

To the residents of Kingtom Bomeh, this neighborhood and the lifestyle of its inhabitants are as desirable and inaccessible as any in the West, but for the fact that they do not need a visa to get there.  Imagine Freetown as a very large soup bowl with a very small v-shaped missing piece.
If you imagined yourself further standing right in the middle of that bowl, you would be in the landfill, with the gap left by the missing piece providing a vista to the sea, obstructed only by St. Edwards Secondary School and Prince of Wales Secondary School. You get a 360-view of the hills of Freetown, the floating grey clouds embracing the tip of the skyscrapers. Or being punctured by them, as by the spires of the iconic Kennedy Building at Fourah Bay College or the telecommunication towers at Leicester Peak. 

All around you, at the base of that bowl, you are in the company of one Freetown City Council truck dumping a load of garbage. Of another pumping out raw untreated sewage. Of the hogs wading and dining luxuriously in that raw sewage. Of women—and a few children and men—frenetically sifting through the new dump. They are barely visible in the methane gas, whose snow-white smoke looks deceptively alluring as it wafts away into the dark smoke of burnt charcoal, happy nevertheless to be unchained, finally, from the bondage of decades of layers of raw, untreated refuse.

All in a day's work for Mary and co. 

It’s hard to tell if the pigs are envious of the methane gas’ newfound freedom. But it is reasonable to assume that the women and children would not mind to book their ticket out of this landfill to a better place. But until that opportunity presents itself, they must make do with this place and make their living within it. Like Mary. At eight a.m., when a handful of her far much more privileged peers drive or are driven through hilly, serpentine roads to work at the Africell headquarters, Mary puts on her knee-high boots and walks just a few yards away from her residence in Kolleh Town to this landfill, her own place of work. Here, in the company of four other women, one boy, two girls, two dogs and Kapay, my shirtless handler, she toils through elbow-deep garbage, her naked fingers sorting through the filth with efficiency akin to an automated mail sorter. Glass bottles here (Le 1,500 or $0.17 a dozen). Mega Cola plastic bottles next to them, Le 500 ($0.06) per dozen. The aluminum cans over there fetch a little bit more at Le 700 ($0.08) per dozen.

Bales of Bomeh plastic bound for Guinea.

On rare occasions, she gets larger-than-usual amounts of those large plastic bottles of water or glass bottles of soft drinks, beer and alcohol. They get this bonanza the day following holidays or big occasions like weddings, when the party is held at the house of those very wealthy people.

"I guess even their housemaids are too well off to bother selling them. I don’t know."     

There’s also the occasional scrap metal. The Indians buy them a lot. But it’s too much hassle to sell them these days. You have to go with a state-issued ID and explain how you got them before they will buy them from you. That’s because there was a raft of scrap metal theft recently, so much that even the police could no longer turn a blind eye. So no, she no longer bothers with them. Too much headache. By the time you are done trying to sell them, you have missed a whole day from the site. Makes no business sense.

"So for now, when we come by scrap metal, we often pass it off as in-kind favors to the area boys. Let them worry about it."

Mary and her colleagues may sell their plastic bottles, glass bottles and aluminum cans to whomsoever they want. But those disused po’ man wata sachets that cost Le 3,000 ($0.34) a bundle of 20 or 21? Those they sell by the kilo. And only to their middlemen. Mary and her colleagues are supplied these huge shell-white bags which weigh upwards of 200 kilos when compact-full. You see them in groups of about 15-20 bags, about five groups in all. Each group belongs to the trailer truck people, who come two to three times a week to collect their haul. Mary knows these brokers. But to most, she is just one of the faceless women whose backs are the only things they see from afar when they come for their pickup. That’s because they do not do business with Mary or any of her colleagues. They do business with the ones Mary does business with. Young men like Kapay, my shirtless handler. She sells those po-man wata sachets to them at Le 500 ($0.06) a kilo. 
She knows that Kapay and his crew in turn sell each kilo for Le 700 ($0.08), a 40% markup, no sweat. But she never once contemplated selling directly to the trailer truck people. For one, she does not have the scale to weigh her load. Only Kapay and his crew do. But she wouldn’t dare even if she did own a scale.

"You just don’t do that. That’s just crazy. You just won’t be able to work or live here anymore. Nothing further to explain, really."

She has no idea about the kop kompanie (i.e. women’s cooperative) that Abu-Bak the push-kiat garbage man told me about. Everyone fends for herself here.

Manure for sale: Heat-dried raw sewage shit. They are nutritious!!!

Once in a while, Mary strikes gold. Like this handbag here with no zippers and a diagonal tear from top right. That could be patched up easily and quickly. It’s brown and black in color, so it would match pretty much any dress or jewelry. And these boots that she is wearing; Amazing find! Brand new! Yeah, those lettering in bold black, which reads Toxic material. Hazardous to your health, bothered her a bit. She had tried scrubbing it off but it just won’t come off. And she is afraid that using Clorox would damage the sheen. It no longer bothers her though. No, she doesn't know what the lettering means. She dropped out of school in Class Six.

Mary says they never sell any form of female jewelry they find. No matter how expensive or cheap. At least not immediately. At least not her. Never. She collects them. She wears them on very special occasions. Which come very rarely, it seems: She last wore a collection seven-and-half years ago. She was five months pregnant with her son, on her wedding day. The latter part she would prefer to forget. She hopes another special occasion, one that she would always remember fondly, would present itself soon for her to wear one of her recent finds, which she adores! 

"Those pearls are just beautiful! Like diamonds! Who throws away diamonds?" 

Very close to Mary is a well-fed sow. Her piglets are nowhere to be found. She seems out of place. She is supposed to be in one of the pens close to the site where Freetown City Council dumps its raw sewage, which is a walking distance between Mary’s apartment complex at Kolleh Town and her place of work at the dump site. It’s so close that you can smell it. Its pungency hits you hard in the nostrils and assails you incessantly. I catch myself involuntarily sniffing at myself, wondering if the smell will stay with me like flies on carrion when I leave. My discomfort is not shared. No one seem to be bothered. Neither man nor pig, neither woman nor sow. That sewage is Black gold. It is the source of life around here. To the pigs, it is just desirably nutritious. You could tell by how big, fat and content they are.

The shit is also in high demand by some White people and even a few JCs. This according to Kapay and one of his crew. Mary says it’s true. They challenge me to come see for myself the traffic of White people and JCs on Sunday. The locals have figured a way to hot-dry the raw sewage, bag them and sell each for Le 3,000 ($0.34). The White people and JCs say the sewage manure yields very big and nutritious vegetables. Perhaps that should not be surprising when you learn that it's the shit of the very, very wealthy few. The majority of Sierra Leoneans still shit in outhouses. They are too poor to shit in a toilet bowl, much less pay for their shit to be pumped out.

That stray female pig is the property of Kapay, my shirtless handler, Mary’s middleman with the scale and the 40% no-sweat markup. He keeps the sow very close to him at all times. She makes the bulk of his wealth, that female pig. His goal is to own his own pen, one of those that you see facing the raw sewage pond. They fetch a lot of money to the very few faceless men who own them. The pigs here are in huge demand. The Chinese and some Indians like them a lot. He once sold his own to a Chinese for Le 800,000 ($89)! And it wasn’t even one of the prize ones. There are about about six to eight pigs at any given time in each of the ten pens owned by no more than three pig farmers in all of Bomeh. Business is brisk for them. Kapay should know. He is one of their shepherds. Some middleman comes for at least five pigs a day, bound for the slaughterhouse. Do the Math.  Kapay recently sold his piglets to one of the pen-owners. He would have loved to raise them all himself but he can’t without a pen. And you just don’t go and build yourself a pen.

"You just don’t do that. That’s just crazy. You just won’t be able to work or live here anymore. Nothing further to explain, really."

With any luck, Mary would have bagged 50 kilos of those po-man wata plastic by 7 p.m., when it’s time to start wrapping up to leave. At Le 500 ($0.06) per kilo, that gets her Le 25,000 ($2.79). She would get another Le 5000 ($0.56) from the assortment of plastic, glass and aluminium cans. Le 30,000 or $3.35 is her target.

Yes, you read that right. Mary toils twelve hours a day, Monday to Saturday, for $3.35 a day.

Anything above that is bonus for her. She makes Le 720,000 a month, which is $80 at the current fair market exchange rate. She is still able to save $25 a month after paying rent (at the cost of her daily take of $3.35), putting food on the table and taking care of her mom and 8-year-old son. And of course, treating herself to a nice shampoo every Sunday, and her nails every month.

Mary does not know how much the trailer truck people sell their haul for. Nor does Kapay. All they know is that the plastic's final destination is neighboring Guinea.

This is the life Mary has known since age nine. She has been too busy working in the garbage field the past twenty years to know if she is happy or satisfied. Or to think about what she wants to do next. She is just thankful to God for now that she is healthy, because she has never been sick except for the occasional malaria. And migraines, which she sleeps off. There’s also the occasional sudden dizziness from that snow-white smoke that always seeps from the garbage. But it is harmless really. You just shake it off and continue.  

Gentrification landing: Landfill's last throes?

About twenty-five meters away to my right, I spot the back of a just-completed house with its sparkling new yellow coat of paint. Its back is literally to the dumpsite. But that does not make it any less desirable than any one of its kind situated far away up the hills, in the vicinity of Wilberforce or Hill Station. You would think that this luxurious building is out of place until you spot quite a few other buildings of its sort all around the site, all in different stages of completion. It looks like they are choking the life out of the landfill. Methodically: Slowly. Steadily. Surely. It’s like Wilberforce invading Kingtom. Generic gentrification at its best. Or Schumpeterian creative destructionism at its worst.

You wonder how much longer Mary will be in business.