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Fathi Ibrahim Bayyoud – Al-Jazeera Talk – Damascus
About those who depend on “Garbage” for a Living; For a life that is full of torture; for satisfying their hunger with bites soaked in pain.
Restless, although very tired. They never give up. In their ragged clothes, and smelling with sweat and trash smell, there hope always remain that within these garbage piles they will find some living.
And that is indeed how they do “secure” their living ... Most of the times…
They are “Garbage Collectors”. A job that quite recently many people turned to in many Arab countries including Syria, because of unemployment, poverty and hunger.And here is a story of Some.
In Homos (a city in Syria), They wake up at dawn, and gather at the city’ smain Garbage Collection Area in “Deer Ba’ala”. There daily job starts as soon as Garbage trucks begin arriving to dump the garbage they collected from the city.
 Trucks dump and they gather. Dump .. Gather .. Searching for anything that might help, Plastic, Metals, Nylon, Beverage Cans, thrown away and worn out electric devices and appliances, … Each of them tries to collect the most he can, then as soon as the sun sets they stop working and start sorting and arranging the things they collected.
What is really interesting is the “Professionalism” in their work. They are not any “Garbage” collectors. They divide themselves into specialized groups; a group for Nylon only, collecting it and nothing else; a group for Beverage cans, similarily; etc … ; Each group has its own tent. These tents that can tell easily what group works in from the garbage thrown outside it.
 Each group also has its own commander and its special way of dealing with its “customers” (i.e. those who buy the material they collect for recycling) .
And thus they live. They rest in torn out tents exactly near the boundaries
of the Garbage Collection Area. These are their homes. Not very different from their lives. A life that very few among us, if any, would ever imagine, but this is not a fairy tale. This is a true story experienced and lived daily by many.
You can see them in Homos, and most probably you can see them in many other places in other Arab and third-world countries.
Unfortunately, nobody cares about them or the life they live, or about helping them … Isn’t it time we give them some attention?
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