Somalia's Garbage Scavengers

No government, no jobs, no hope, but plenty of garbage. For two disabled Somali war veterans, a garbage dump isn't just a place to find food - it's home.

MOGADISHU, Somalia - If you could pick a worse place to live it would be hard to imagine. Abdul Mohammed, 43, and Ahmed Iften, 45, have spent the past 10 years working a fetid expanse of refuse they call home.

Both are Somali Army veterans who fought in the ill-fated 1977 attempt to seize back disputed territory from neighboring Ethiopia. Both were seriously wounded.

Abdul pulls up the leg of his green shorts to expose a deeply pitted wound left by an Ethiopian AK-47 round that erased most of the muscle mass of his upper thigh, leaving lasting physical and mental damage.

For dapperly dressed Ahmed, wearing a vest and checkered kaffiyeh (an Arab headdress), it was a land mine that changed his life. It shredded his lower leg, which required amputation. The nub below the kneecap hinges back and forth, looking for purchase.

The men spend their days sifting this mass of detritus, looking for food, cigarettes, amusement -- anything that will keep them alive.

"We get so excited," says Abdul, "when the trucks bring new garbage; sometimes we find things that we can sell in the marketplace for money."

The landscape is as bleak as Dante's vision of Hell. The desert scrub of cactus and thornbush catch the thousands and thousands of colored plastic bags that have held everything from bread to kilos of khat (a chewable stimulant herb), creating a shimmering, crackling horizon of undulating waste. It is overwhelmingly desperate and defeating.

Nearby the corpse of a donkey rots in the middle of the street, while cows and goats compete in the fields with the men for anything that is still edible.

The things they collect are as telling as the expressions on their creased faces: bottle caps and shards of metal, pictures and coiled springs -- things they can sell or perhaps make something from.

"I'm an actor," Abdul says in a disconcerting, sprightly way. "An actor of garbage."

A short distance from where they are sifting through the fields, another compatriot, Ali Muhammed, is cooking something in a tin can over a smoldering garbage fire.

He says he is 18, but his tired and puffy face makes him look much older.

He pokes the bubbling white mass with a slender, grooved, metal utensil that looks like molding stripped from a car door. He dips it into the can and takes a taste.

"What are you cooking?" I ask.

"Brains," he says. "Cow brains."

The smoke from the fire at least keeps the flies, which cover everything else within three feet, off us. Ali is cooking next to the "igloos" of garbage in which they live: old suitcases piled onto cushions and clothing stretched over branches. It is nothing less than horrid. A dog lies on a pile of cow bones near the entrance, while her pups roughhouse with each other inside.

I poke my head inside and see a blanket of flies covering everything in sight. There is a cup, some bubble packets of pills, a book and a photo of a beautiful woman on the cover of a music cassette.

Abdul sifts through layers of plastic, metal and paper that cover the landscape for a mile in every direction. He finds a pack of cigarettes with a few broken butts. He quickly pops one in his mouth and attempts to light it. It takes several tries, but eventually he's able to pull a drag of smoke from the dried-out cigarette. A moment of comfort in a life that has very little.

"Why do you live here?" I ask Abdul, my sense of incredulity not well hidden.

"We have no where else to go," he says, matter of factly. "We have no money, no families. This is where we live."

"But why here? Why in the garbage?"

"It provides us with what we need. Sure life is hard, but it's not so bad."

He says there are many more like him -- hundreds in Mogadishu scavenge here every day -- trapped in an unforgiving vice between poverty, violence and the brutal warlords who use arms to extort what little they have left. It is impossible to estimate the actual number of homeless in Somalia; with the absence of a functioning central government, statistics do not exist.

"Don't you want something better for yourself?" I ask him.

"Things might be better, but this is the way it is. God will take care of us."

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