Poverty drives women to stone crushing...
Poverty drives women to stone crushing
Date: January 1, 1970
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Stone crushers face a constant risk of hand and eye injury. They breathe-in huge quantities of stone dust that expose them to the risk to cardiac diseases. Even after crushing work, their families hardly have enough to eat. Loveness Lungu, a stone crusher from Kalingalinga where women have taken to this occupation to earn a living says: ?government and society have neglected us. Many people come and interview us, but nothing changes? now, some people are threatening to chase us from here after this year?s elections.?
Imagine squatting in the hot sun from morning to sunset, expending joint-straining amounts of energy just to transform large pieces of rocks into a single meal.
Stone crushers face a constant risk of hand and eye injury. They breathe in huge quantities of stone dust that expose them to the risk to cardiac diseases. Even after crushing work, their families hardly have enough to eat.
The job is the monotonous reduction of big stones into small ones for the building industry. It takes about a week to make a 10 tonne mound of gravel. Women armed with picks and hammers heat huge stones under dangerous high pressure to crack them into sizeable pieces before crushing them.
Loveness Lungu, a stone crusher from Kalingalinga where women have taken to this occupation to earn a living says: “government and society have neglected us. Many people come and interview us, but nothing changes… now, some people are threatening to chase us from here after this year’s elections.”
As she spoke her seven-year-old daughter sat beside her crushing stones in the cold. She had no protective clothing. The little girl wore a sad face, torn from the windy dust, and the hard stones she was exposed to. She continued hitting the hammer against the huge stones whose unbearable force had her unintentionally dropping the hammer to the ground.
“Don’t worry. She has become an expert in stone crushing; she started doing it when she was only four-years-old,” her mother said.
Lungu lost her husband in 2000 and has had to struggle to bring up her two children.
“I live in Kalingalinga and I have two children, one is fifteen years old and is in Grade 8 at Kabulonga boys secondary school and his younger sister is here helping me raise money for my family” she said.
A wheelbarrow load of crushed stone costs K6, 000 (US $1.50). One person sells about fifteen wheelbarrow loads on a good day. But on bad days, they sell one load or, sometimes, they leave for their homes without a single coin.
Another stone crusher Angela Phiri says she knows the dangers associated with the risky job but has no choice. “I have done tie and die but lack capital to concentrate on my trade” Phiri said.
Despite the fact that- according to the fianance minister Ng’andu Magande, Zambia’s coffers are $150 million richer after the G8 countries decided to cancel the external debt in response to the country’s attainment of the HIPC Completion Point, little is being done to help women like these stone crushers.
Mines and mineral development deputy minister in charge of small-scale miners, Stephen Mukuka said much as government wants to empower Zambian miners and the women folk, it will not tolerate illegal miners who include stone crushers.
The women stone crushers said they do not even know the procedure on obtaining a license and let alone the revolving fund. Mukuka said it is the duty of the Environmental Council of Zambia (ECZ) to sensitise the miners on the dangers of illegal mining and the procedure to obtain licenses.
Wamunyima Walubita is a journalist in Zambia. This article is part of the Gender Links Opinion and Commentary Service that provides fresh views on everyday news.
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