Gallery: Haunting Photos of the Children Toiling in Egypt's Limestone Mines
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Located on the banks of the Nile and 150 miles south of Cairo, the city of Menya (sometimes spelled Minya) has more than 300 quarries which employ 15,000 people. A sizable proportion of the workforce are children and some are as young as 10-years-old.
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Photographer Myriam Abdelaziz visited the quarries on three occasions, for a week each time. Abdelaziz is Egyptian and is now based in France.
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It is illegal to hire children, yet many poor families send their young sons to work in the quarries.
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The figures resemble sci-fi characters, or maybe Burning Man revelers. But this isn’t Tattoine, nor the Playa, and these are not scenes of fantasy or hedonism. This is harsh reality.
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“Child labor is a dominating phenomenon in Egypt,” read a 2011 Faculty of Economics and Political Science at Cairo University report.
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The limestone quarries are a mainstay of Menya’s economy but they’re rarely reported on.
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In the past decade, efforts to eradicate child labor in Menya’s quarries have failed. Awareness campaigns, reintegrating child workers into school environments, and training children in less dangerous jobs have no reduced the number of young workers.
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“Children take jobs wherever and whenever an extra hand is needed. Mechanics garages, delivery boys, cleaning people,” says Abdelaziz, “any bottom of the ladder jobs, basically. Some families cannot survive if everyone is not working so child labor is seen as something common.”
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The United Nations defines child labor as: a single hour of economic work or 28 hours of domestic work per week (for 5-11 yrs); or 14+ hours of economic work or 28 hours of domestic work per week (12-14 yrs); or 43 hours of economic or domestic work per week (15-17 yrs).
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“The work is very dangerous,” says Abdelaziz. “Many children working there die prematurely.” Children can loss limbs or die from electrocution.
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The mines are a relatively small part of child labor statistics. More children work in agriculture than any other sector in Egypt — approximately three out of every four child laborers.
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Regular inhalation of the limestone dust which contains silica will lead to asbestosis, silicosis and lung fibrosis. “Most workers who survive the various other accidents end up contracting deadly pulmonary diseases before they reach even their thirties,” says Abdelaziz.
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Work is, in most cases, damaging to a child’s educational development, according to a 2010 National Child Labour Survey by the Egyptian Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS).
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Abdelaziz donated her images to a local charity that is working to provide small business loans to poor families so that they might engineer a route away from reliance on low skilled labor jobs.
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Long term social issues have been exacerbated by recent political shifts. The ousting of President Mubarak brought instability. “Egypt has always been a place where the poorest are constantly on the edge,” says Abdelaziz. “Economically, they’re always in a crisis but for sure things got much worse after the events of January 2011.”
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The global economic crisis has left the young and educated without job prospects. Abdelaziz met several college graduates working in the quarries also.
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”The \[economic\] situation encourages parents to think practically and to believe that if their children learn a profession by practical training early on they will be better off than wasting their time in college and being jobless at the end,” says Abdelaziz.
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Almost 40 percent of Egypt’s population is aged 15 or younger — a huge proportion relative to other nations. As such, the safety, well-being and schooling of the youngest generations will be key to Egypt’s future stability.
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If children are going to be schooled instead of worked, Abdelaziz believes legislative change must be accompanied by widespread change in social attitudes.
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An average quarry workers wage is between LE50 and LE100 ($7 and $14) per day. It is a high amount compared to that of farmers, carpenters and auto repair workers.
