Buy PRIVATE 55 [I]n the ‘Dar es Salam II’, more precisely in ‘Compossed’, there is a waste disposal where everyday many trucks deliver one part of the 700.000 people’s city rubbish. On one side boys meet every day to work, seeking every kind of scrap iron, hoping to make some money out of it. This reality is considered a source of employment for a number of young people. A group of boys are workers hoping to escape poverty digging bunkers and searching for precious material.
The working day is endless, oppressive and worsened by the burning heat of these desert lands. Their only tools are their hands and shovels, plus the spirit and desire to leave poverty behind and be able to feed their families. The buried iron has been theirs since the time of Ahmed Sékou Touré, the first president of the nation after independence from France in 1958. This is a place of broken machines transformed by the passing of time into a rubbish dump and cemetery of buried metals.
(Fernando Gallardo | Iron Hands, PRIVATE 55, pages 22-25)
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