For Karmo women, sand is smooth, rough biz

In the early days of her life, every morning at about 6a.m, Mama Esther will walk half a kilometre from Makanima with her two daughters to get to the river for their daily routine. They will dig for hours to gather heaps of sand which would be sold. “I can’t do this work as I […]

In the early days of her life, every morning at about 6a.m, Mama Esther will walk half a kilometre from Makanima with her two daughters to get to the river for their daily routine. They will dig for hours to gather heaps of sand which would be sold. “I can’t do this work as I used to in those days,” she says. “I now come here at 9 am and alone. My daughters are married now and only I have to do the work.”

Now Mama (as she is addressed) is 60, but with her withered body, she still manages to get something for herself from a place that has been a resource for years. Unlike the younger women who get into the river, which is about 400 meters wide with rock scattered all over the banks, she manages to gather what she can outside the water.

She is about six feet and wore an oversize T-shirt on an inner skirt. With a hoe whose weight seems too heavy for her now, she struggles to scrape some sand from the earth beneath the river and laboriously conveys it to her site, hitting her bare feet on the bare rocks.

 “All the women in my village are here because men do not do this job. They have left it for us. They say it is a woman’s job, so they allow their wives to do it. The men go to the farms, while the women come here every day,” she said, as she struggles to scrape some sand from a rocky spot.

Though Mama suffers from an eye defect, which makes it difficult for her to locate better places where the sand is, for a widow like her whose only son is still struggling to acquire secondary school education, she has to continue with the job to get her son to complete his education.

“I wrote my WAEC last year but could not get all my papers,” says Ibrahim Gwatama, Mama’s only son. “That is why I have come here to help my mother so that we can get some money for me to repeat the papers again.”

He says though the young men in the village always mock of him that he is doing women’s job, he is not deterred by it, “because I believe one day, they will be envious of me after I have achieved my dreams,” he says.

Women in Makanima engage in selling firewood as another occupation. “It is not an easy occupation now,” says Mama Esther. “You don’t get good firewood nearby again. Not as during our time where you just go behind your house and fetch firewood. Now, they have to travel far into the bush. And even then, they may not get a substantial quantity. But here, they just come and get sand which is easier for them.”

The business of sand digging is also more lucrative. “At the moment we buy a heap of sand at the rate of N700 per mound,” says Ibrahim Sarki, a driver who conveys sand from the spot. “This is more expensive now than the dry season when it costs between N400 to N3, 000.”

The river bank is a colony of sorts. From the top of a bridge underneath which the river flows, women are everywhere and inside the river digging out the sand and conveying it to a small road that enters the river bank from the expressway. The sand is dug using a hoe. The size of hoes used depends on the strength of each digger. Young women use bigger hoes with wider blades and longer handles, while old women and girls use smaller hoes.

For children who are not old enough to use these tools, they have a nice time playing in the water.

“We don’t have somebody to entrust the children with. That is why we bring them here,” says Ruth Gimba. “Our husbands have all gone to the farm and every woman in the village is here, so who will take care of the children if we don’t bring them here?” she asks, while taking her child towards the shade of a tree which serves as a rest spot for the women and their children.

Ruth says that each person can gather two or three heaps in a day, but in most cases, women form groups and each group gathers sand to put up heaps after which proceeds are shared among members of the group. “In my group, we are five women. And in a day, each person could get between N3, 000 and N4, 000 from the sale of our sand.  

But work is also done on family-to-family basis. For people who have grown-up daughters, the children come together and gather,” Ruth says.

She says women use the money from this job to help their families. “We have children whom we spend our money on, though our husbands do give us money, but when it is not enough, we can use the one we have to supplement. And that is why they allow us to come out and do the work,” she says.

For Mama Esther, it is the best thing their men have done for them. “If not for that, many women will not have an income of their own,” she says, as she gathers her items by a tree, with her hoe on her shoulder leaving for the village. Sweet and rough, indeed.