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Crushing stones to raise families
2008-02-17 10:05:21
By Staff Reporter
This is the lot of some Dar es Salaam women, some of whom have been abandoned by their husbands. Periodic raids by city militiamen compound the plight of the halpless women who also court grave health risks.
``It is true that this job is too hard for a woman like me but I have no alternative. I am not well educated. Stone crushing is a job I am compelled to do,`` she says, adding, ``I have to raise my three children.``
She arrives at the place daily at 5.00 am from Tabata where she is residing and with other women she places an order to buy stones from Bunju and Boko areas on the outskirts of the city and crush them. She herself can produce about ten buckets of gravel a day.
She strongly opposes the notion that some jobs are meant for men while others are specific for women, saying, ``We are equal and we all want to survive.``
A bucket of gravel is sold at between Sh 700 and Sh 800 depending on the purchasing power of their potential customers. Business is however not always smooth. On some bad days, one can sell only one or two buckets .
She notes that their business has become even harder because of the recent sharp rise in cement prices recently making potential customers less willing to engage themselves in construction activities.
Another woman, Esta Mathew (26) plunged into the difficult stone crushing activity accidentally.
The man she was living with abandoned her at Nzega, Tabora, leaving her with two children, to take care of - Emmanuel Damalu (10) and Mathew Damalu (6). She has never seen him since then.
Esta lives at Boko- Magereza in the proximity of the stone and rubble quarries in the Dar es Salaam suburb.
``I cannot find any justification for my husband to abandon the family, but when I think twice I can guess that he did that because life within the family was unbearable. I woke up that unforgettable day and found myself alone in bed.
I actually cried and tried to look for him all over the place without success,`` Esta sadly narrated, wiping off her tears.
She said she plucked her courage and opened up a new chapter in her life and accepted the situation. She had to seek for a new activity to make her earn a living with her two children.
She decided to go to Dar es Salaam and successfully secured a job as a saleswoman in a shop somewhere in the city.
But the job didn`t last long before she was kicked out by a relative of her boss. She was reduced to cutting grass for feeding cattle owned by her employer. For that she earned 10,000/- a month.
She opted to vacate the place for her friend`s dwelling place. That is when she started crushing stones and survived by selling the pebbles alongside other equally desperate women.
``I now have my own room in Tegeta Kibaoni and I can manage to send some money back home to cater for food and schooling for my sons. Emmanuel is now in Standard Two and Mathew is in nursery school back in the village… Thank God I`ve managed to survive with my sons,`` she says.
She narrates, ``Sometimes I hit a stone with a hammer several times without successfully crushing it into pieces. Then I stand aside and ask myself… would the stone behave that way if I were a man?``
Then she seeks assistance from a passing man, but says sometimes men could make them even more frustrated.
``If I come and help you break the stone then promise me that you will sleep with me this evening,`` she recalls a man telling her one day when she requested his help. She chose to refuse the man`s precondition as he went away hurling insults at her.
She says as a woman it is difficult to work with men in such kinds of jobs as stone crushing. ``There is no respect there. If you are a woman and choose to work here with men then don`t expect any respect from them.
It doesn`t matter in what age bracket you are. Get ready to be insulted even by small boys who might be of your children’s age. They may kick you if you try to be harsh to them,`` she says.
“We women cannot lift heavy stones from the pits so we sometimes pay men to help us. The situation becomes harder at times when we lack money. The valuable stones of ours are being taken by men if we can’t lift and crush them`` she says.
As for Patricia Mathew, her relatives don’t even know that she was crushing stones to earn a living with her family.
Her brothers have been shocked to see their sister doing such a hard job. They cannot however stop her because her husband allowed her to do so after finding the need to salvage the family.
Patricia is a mother of four working at Boko-Magereza.
She has spent a year crushing the stones.
She is able to foot most of the household expenses including school fees for her children.
Her husband is a jobless man and depends on casual labour to get some money.
“Even though we face harassment from some men at the quarry there is no way I could abandon the work. It is our source of livelihood,`` she says. On a good day she can crush up to 30 buckets of pebbles.
``The job is tough and for us women we can hardly carry on beyond three years. A woman has to quit or else she can die. We only do it because we don’t have an alternative means of livelihood,`` Patricia says.
``Girls as young as 17 years and some standard seven girls who did not get a chance to proceed to secondary schooling are also engaged in the work,`` she said.
There are even those women who come to the work because they have people living with HIV/Aids to take care of. ``We ask the government for a helping hand by striking a deal with financial institutions to provide us with small loans especially for women so that we can do away with crushing stones which affects our health.
If that is not possible it should find us markets like construction companies,`` she says.
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