The Trash Pickers of Gigodi

We have made the bone jolting 65 km trip from Zomba to Blantyre many times. I  am beginning to be familiar with this road,  but I can't say that I am used to it. This partially paved road, known as the Kamuzu Highway, has crater sized potholes and the long unpaved sections are a dust cloud in dry weather and a slurry of mud when it rains.

There are trucks, minibuses, and cars that travel this road, but the major transporters of goods are the bicycles.  Besides all the other traffic, along the way you will pass hundreds of people walking, many balancing baskets,  buckets, or bundles on their heads. 

This  road threads through many scattered communities and intersects trails going out to the villages.  There are little shops clustered  near the highway  and for shoppers who can afford it,  bicycle taxis are parked nearby to deliver people and goods to their destinations. 

 You will pass many little communities, most with shops of grass and bamboo construction and more durable small, mud brick buildings with rusty tin roofs. Here shoppers purchase seasonal fruits and vegetables, rice and maize flour, charcoal and firewood, as well as tall stalks of sugar cane.   

Several larger faded and chipped brick shops stand huddled under one roof among the crumbling infrastructure,  as testaments to the colonial era.  Each shop has a front porch and a  large window covered with chicken wire through which you can see merchandise grouped on shelves and hung on walls inside. Here's where you can buy a cold soda, matches,   a box of cookies, and a wide assortment of other items.

As you near Blantyre, you will begin to gain elevation, and if you look off to the right, you will see the multistory buildings of the city sparkling pristinely along the horizon.  But just  here, at the crest of a long ascent, you will pass through a town that catches your breath as you pass through.   It is the little town called  Gigodi. A few meters off the roadway, in a large smudgy black area sit the charcoal sellers, with their merchandise in little blue bags sitting in rows on the  stained black earth. Along the roadside and among the shops a mixture of food scraps, vegetation, and discarded plastic bags litter the ground and clog the ditches. 

A  little distance farther and just off to your left  is a road that  courses upward and out of sight through a thicket of tall  vegetation.  From a distance, you see a  trash truck  turn off the road, pass through the thicket, and disappear.

 Then as you approach the turnoff, you begin to notice a swarm of movement along the ridges off to your left. Looking more closely, you realize that the ridges are tall mounds of trash and  the  swarm of movement on the surface is being made by people picking through the trash.  Coursing down that road toward the highway, you see several men, women,and children, clothes stained by rain spattered garbage.  These are the trash pickers of Gigodi.