Ramasseuses de Sable

Ramasseuses de sable, in French, means sand collectors. To be precise, female sand collectors. Because French as a Latin language has this weird habit to attribute genders to nouns, adjectives and stuff.

French is the official language of Benin, a small Republic in Western Africa. One of the poorest countries, in the poorest area, in the poorest continent of the planet. It hosts the biggest market of the surroundings: Dantokpa.

Dantokpa is a word in the traditional language of Benin, Fon. It means "This side of the bay". It's not a market like you can imagine if you visited Mediterranean Europe or some nice Bazaar in the middle east. Dantokpa is a chaotic world where everything is sold, from animal skulls used as Voodoo ingredients to expensive jewels to, when the night comes, trafficked children.

And it's a Slum.

Out of the 80,000 people selling and trading daily in Dantokpa, half of them, 40,000, live in the market. Not in a building or a nice home: they lie a mat on the ground and wait for the morning after. Every day. Some of them never left the market-slum in their life.

There is no specific data about child mortality or death caused by Malaria in Dantokpa, but both will be very high. Everyone tries to survive financially in some ways. There are honest merchants, pickpockets, but there is also a whole universe of people doing things unfathomable for someone who's never been there.

And here come the sand collectors.

They are all girls. Aged between 14 and 30 generally, already mothers to one to eight children, their job is to walk 50 meters. And then back. For the whole day. With a heavy tray full of wet sand that will be used for constructions.

The sand is collected by the men at the bottom of the bay, taken to the shore with wooden boats, to the closest place to a road. Not so close anyway, it's still 50 meters to the area where the truck can park. And the Ramasseuses de Sable load the heavy sand on their head and walk the distance to download it in the truck. All day. Every day. Till they die.

Not everyone dies young but many do. Because of Malaria, as mosquitoes enjoy the bay area a lot. Those that reach the age of 30, after half of their life walking with wet sand on their head, looks much older than they are: the weight damages their legs and spine.

The pay: around 1,000 CFA Francs per day. It means 1.50 Euros, a bit less than $2. The World Bank Organisation recently raised the official Extreme poverty line to $1.90 per day, so the Ramasseuses de Sable are now officially, extremely poor. But they were definitely already at the time this picture was taken, in February 2009. Not to mention that, of the 4 women that can be seen in the middle of this pictures, statistically one will be dead by now.

Collecting and carrying sand by hand is a pretty common practice all over sub-Saharan Africa, but very few places present conditions as harsh as Dantokpa, the largest slum in Western Africa.

Here as some more pictures of the Ramasseuses de Sable.