Poverty pushes Mayuge women, children into stone quarries

Without any protective gear women and children in Mayuge District get down to their daily chore of excavating and crushing stones to earn a meal for the family. The trend has shifted from fishing since most of the fishermen have died and the fish have dwindled. Saturday Monitor’s Pauline Kairu visited the quarries and narrates her experience:-

From the bottom of the hills, echoes of crashing rocks are abound. Atop the hills, all that is visible are clouds of dust wafting into the air.

On the steep hillsides, units of wide caved-out walls hang precariously over their creators. These are the ragged hills of Ntinkalu-Misoli village in Waisala Sub-county, Mayuge District, onto which hundreds of women accompanied by their children have descended to earn a living for the last two decades.

As the cruel claws of death from the HIV/Aids scourge robbed them of some of their breadwinner fishermen, the now aging women, majority of whom had been fish mongers on the northern fringes of the district, just near the shores of Lake Victoria, turned to the next unexploited natural resource in their vicinity.

Only income source
Here generations have devoted their lives to the back-breaking occupation that is crushing the massive granite and dolomite rocks spread out over the more than 100 acres of land that rolls down the chain of hills.

Dozens of women burrow deep in the caves while young boys hurl rocks out into the open where others wait to haul them to form piles. More sit out in the sweltering open air with different kinds and sizes of hammers and huge rocks unrelentingly hitting at the rocks.

They crash the rocks into tiny fragments to make gravel. This will be collected by middlemen in their trucks to feed into the flourishing construction industry in the country. In one of the deep pits we come across Ms Madina Ndibarekela.

She lurches out of one of the valleys that has formed from years of excavation to speak to us. Weary, she wipes beads of murky sweat from her eye lashes.
She is 62 and has worked at the quarries for more than 20 years. Alongside her are her four grandchildren of school going age.

Though they enrolled for the Universal Primary Education they eventually dumped their books for the beckoning hills of Ntinkalu.

Survival for the fittest
The elderly lady, who resides about a kilometre from the site, says pitching up for this physically gruelling work is their only means of survival.
“By 7am we are up here and we don’t return home until 7pm or when there is moon-light to make dinner,” she says.

Asked why her grandchildren were not attending school, she hastens to say it is a means of increasing the amount of money they make as a household.

“These children’s parents have died and I am aging but I am supposed to cater for all of them. We have no other means to ensure our livelihood,” she adds.

Ms Ndibarekela explains that the children, between six and 11 years, play different but vital roles for the sustenance of their business at the quarry.
She quickly adds that they are their own freewill because they also earn their own money.

At the hills, a truckload of gravel, commonly referred to here as ‘a trip’, goes for between Shs50,000 and Shs80,000 depending on the quality and size of gravel. However, the smaller sizes that fetch more may take up to one month to pile a justification for the encouragement of children by their parents to join in the trade.

Another woman, 54-year-old Zainabu Kadunga, has worked at the quarries for the last 14 years. She works with her three children; one a teenager who goes to secondary school but joins them every evening and on weekends.

“We have been able to pay for her fees using this money that we earn from here with her younger siblings,” Ms Kadunga says. Like many in this web of hills, Ms Kadunga’s husband had been a fish monger at the Misoli Landing Site but died after a long illness.

Their only assets were the neighbouring rocky hills.
“Here the land is rocky and the agricultural yield is very little,” the lady who likens the hills to a stream that never runs dry says. “There is no more fish in the lake and we are now our own bread earners. If we had other respectable places to get money from we would go there. But why leave this free resource that God has given us for other places that we are not sure will not be as toilsome?” she says.

They may not have land titles to show for it but they own these rocky lands. Once, the forestry department tried to halt their activities but elicited a huge demonstration.

They argue that this is a government hill and they should be allowed to exploit it since the government has failed to bring alternative means of survival. She says there are about 400 quarriers here with the majority being women mostly widowed ones.

As with every labourer here fears abound over the safety of the quarries. The stone pits have developed into death traps for their excavators.