A Tale of Afghan ‘Garbage’ Kids

Those who wonder why Pakistan keeps its border closed to thousands of new Afghan refugees need look no further than Abdul Hakim and his five scruffy little brothers.

Hakim, as he is commonly called, his brothers and thousands of other Afghan urchins like them survive on society’s outer edge, scavenging for bits of plastic, glass and paper from the garbage piles of Pakistan’s poorest region, then selling the scraps for a pittance to recycling centers.

The children, some as young as 7, were born of the generation of Afghan refugees that flooded into Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s to escape the plagues of war, anarchy and drought. The poorest of these people--those with no money, no skills, no hope and no future--have turned to their youngsters for help surviving.

Here in the city of Quetta, just 50 miles from the Afghan border and already swollen with refugees, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 youngsters are known simply as “the garbage children.” On a good day, Hakim, 15, says, the brothers’ pooled earnings can reach $1.50--enough to pay for a few days’ rent on the family’s shanty. On bad days, they bring in less than 50 cents.

In Quetta, Karachi and other Pakistani cities, these boys exist in a kind of Dickensian twilight zone, a filthy and dangerous world. As they walk the streets and rummage for scraps, they are weak prey to every form of lowlife predator, from petty thieves, drug peddlers and pedophiles to sophisticated kidnapping rings that traffic in blood and human organs.

As such, the children represent one of the more disturbing aspects of Pakistan’s current refugee crisis. Their presence embodies fears for the next.

“These boys have no education, they have no future,” said Naimathullah Baloch, deputy director of the Directorate of Social Welfare, Human Rights and Women’s Development for the Baluchistan provincial government. “They are the breeding ground of gangsters and thieves. The law and order situation is getting worse because of these people. Someone should say it.”

Few Resources Available to Help the Youngsters

With thousands of new refugees pushing across the frontier in recent weeks to escape Afghanistan’s latest agony, the ranks of these youngsters seem bound to swell and their conditions worsen.

Mohammed Saeed is convinced of that.

Saeed administers a small daytime shelter funded by Save the Children USA that offers the boys snacks, showers and a kind of informal schooling that collectively serve as a brief escape from their punishing days.

“The numbers are growing,” he said. “Where there were once a hundred boys combing the same area, now there are 500. It’s a terrible situation.”

Energy, mobility and nimble fingers make children ideal for the job of picking through trash, according to those who know the trade. Adults could never do it, they say.

In a country struggling with enormous problems of its own, there are few resources available to deal with these children, however compelling their need. “We don’t have the facilities or the money,” Baloch said.

So far, two shelters started by Save the Children in late 1999 have registered only 600 boys.

Despite the grueling work and personal danger that mark each day, an amazing spirit--even zest--for life shone through among those children who visited one of the shelters on a day last week. They drew pictures, colored and cut out patterns with a diligence comparable to any young student looking to please the teacher.

When the instructor, 20-year-old Nassrin Yusif, chalked a three-dimensional house on the blackboard and asked the children to draw their own houses on paper, heads went down amid “oohs” and “ahhs” about how hard the task was. But within minutes, several had produced rich, bright houses in yellows, blues and reds rarely seen in Baluchistan’s harsh sand-colored landscape.

Many of the boys also had their own notebooks carefully filled with arithmetic lessons, including the numbers from 1 to 100.

The boys are encouraged to use the showers at the shelter, but they know there can be dangers in looking too clean. There are men who seek sexual pleasure with young boys, and it is unwise for a defenseless lad to look too attractive.

On this day, Hakim came with his five brothers, including 7-year-old twins Issa and Hussain, along with Naeem, 13, and Saleh, 8. Hasan, 10, was barefoot, his shoes taken by a group of toughs four days earlier as he made his rounds. A 3-year-old toddler stayed at home. As is common in rural Afghanistan, the siblings do not use a family name.

Their story is one of a once-proud farming family from southwestern Afghanistan’s Farah province that fled to Pakistan early during the 1979-89 occupation of its country by the Soviet military.

According to various accounts pieced together, the boys’ father settled his family in Quetta, managed to start a small business and took a second wife, as is allowable under Muslim custom. But he also built up debts. When he couldn’t repay them, he fled with his second wife, leaving Hakim’s mother and her seven children to fend for themselves.

Today, the family lives in a cramped two-room shanty on this city’s eastern fringes. The boys sleep on the ground, with only a layer of leaves to soften the earth.

Before his first growth of beard, Hakim has become the father figure, a handsome youth whose quick smile and easy manner mask a melancholy in his eyes. The respect of his siblings is clear. Most days the brothers leave home about 7 a.m., armed only with plastic sacks and the hope that they will eat before the day ends.

They walk more than two miles to familiar turf, a section of the city whose garbage has become the family’s lifeline. Hakim said they are often taunted by more affluent children as they make their rounds. Sometimes, he said, they are chased and occasionally robbed of what little they have.

Asked what was hardest about such responsibility at a young age, Hakim replied simply: “The thought that tomorrow we may starve.”

Winter Weather Among Perils of Life on Streets

As the chill of the coming winter descends on Quetta, the brothers contemplate joining the annual child migration already underway, a trek south to work the back streets and dumpsters in teeming Karachi. Because the port city is big and unknown, Hakim said, he and his brothers would prefer not to go; but if the weather gets too cold, they will have little choice.

As they make their daily rounds, the boys are always tempted to stray into Quetta’s more lucrative neighborhoods, especially the military zone where the trash can yield nuggets that would take hours to gather elsewhere.

But scavenging in military areas is forbidden, and such excursions are risky. Two of the brothers and a friend had ignored warnings one day and paid the price. All three were quickly caught, but the two brothers were released with little more than a fright. The third youngster wasn’t so lucky, telling a visitor that he had been stripped naked, kicked and beaten by military police before being let go.

Far worse has happened to Pakistan’s garbage children. Saeed, the shelter administrator, said there were cases in the northwestern city of Peshawar in which boys were kidnapped, then dumped a few days later barely alive and minus a kidney.

Occasionally, there also are acts of kindness. Naeem, the 13-year-old, has struck up a relationship with a homeowner who pays him the equivalent of 25 cents a month to carry out the family’s trash each day, then take what he wants from it. Last Thursday, the family also presented him with two small bags--one with fresh lamb, a second with curried vegetables.

An Uncanny Optimism From Acts of Kindness

Such glimmers of humanity help fuel an uncanny optimism among the boys as they go through their day, at times carefully sorting through a large pile of residential garbage, at others moving quickly through the city’s business district, suddenly scampering left or right into a store or market.

On Wednesday, the barefoot Hasan bounced out of a food store with an overloaded wastebasket and a large grin, searching for anything to take with him and then returning the receptacle to the store. The brothers also were buoyed by a windfall: Hakim had paid a heroin addict a few cents for a pile of plastic bottles and other recyclable items they knew were worth far more.

The boys probably had walked five or six miles since the day began, but in the late afternoon light there was a noticeable spring in their step. With their sacks nearly full, they entered a dirt alley that leads to the recycling center.

The depots are run by Afghan refugees, and the owner of this one said he relies on the children for his business. Hakim and his brothers are among the reliable ones, he said with just a hint of respect.

“They are working for themselves,” he said. “There’s a dignity in that. They don’t beg.”

The brothers spent half an hour carefully sorting plastic from paper and both from metal such as paint can lids. One of the boys had medical waste, including used syringes and plastic tubes smeared with what appeared to be blood. Once sorted and packed into bags, the booty was weighed by the owner.

The hundreds of centers in Quetta pay a fixed rate for recyclable items: 3 cents per kilogram [2.2 pounds] for glass, a little more for plastic, slightly less for paper. This day, despite the heroin addict’s help, the haul remained average--just under $1. Hakim seemed disappointed as each boy took the money earned.

Later, in what has become a family ritual, each personally presented his day’s take to his mother. And before bedtime Thursday, the family ate the lamb and vegetables Naeem had received, tantamount to a banquet.

The future for Hakim, his brothers and the tens of thousands of other refugee children who scratch out a living in Pakistan is limited. If they can avoid crime, their sorting skills can give them a chance to get off the streets and find work in a recycling depot. If they work hard and persevere, they might one day own a depot--an achievement that would not bring a fortune, but at least an escape from poverty.

But Hakim nurtures a different dream.

“I wish I could learn something else or do some other job,” he said. “That is my dream.”