På arbejde med kloakrenserne i Bangladesh hovedstad – lønnen i bund og stanken i top
At the bottom of a five-foot-deep manhole situated at the Kakrail intersection in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, sits Madhob in a pool of human wastes and residues (efterladenskaber), writes the Dhaka daily “New Age”, Sunday.
He empties the thick black sludge (søle,mudder) from a clogged sewer (fyldt kloak) into a bucket which his fellow team members pull up and dump in the middle of a narrow road with a hoe (hakke) and a spade.
A small pile of decaying excrement accumulates between the manhole and a wooden cart.Three co-workers then reach down and pull him out by his sore, extended arms, his body splattered with rotten sewage.
At 47, with a six-member family to feed and a monthly income of about 300 daily, he has been a sewage worker for the Dhaka City Corporation for the past 15 years. He complains of skin rashes (hudirritationer), eye soreness, respiratory (luftvejslidelser) and liver problems. It is perhaps the most filthy job that any person can do in Bangladesh — to clean the country’s sewers. But someone has to do it.
Half-naked workers enter manhole covers and enter into the mass of sewers in order to remove blockages in the miles of the sewers in the country’s main cities.
Abdul Huddus, a fifty-year-old man, was preparing himself with a chisel (mejsel) and a spade to work below a manhole at Uttara sector 13 road 5. Looking down the manhole, he was discussing with his three other team members how to clean the drain.
“Our job is risky and unhygienic and most people would not want to work down below the manhole,” Huddus told New Age.
“Inside the manhole, amongst the sewerage, there is often poisonous gas, broken glass, stones, and pieces of brick which are very dangerous for us worker inside and we get hurt frequently. Workers can be killed by drowning, falls, and exposure to chlorine or hydrogen sulfide gas,” he said.
Huddus, from Maradipur, has been working for fourteen years as a sewerage worker and supports through his income three daughters, one son and his wife. He is employed by a contractor that won a tender from the Dhaka City Corporation.
Huddus works between 9:00am and sunset and gets paid at the end of each day. Workers who do the riskiest jobs get Tk 300, with other workers getting less.
“The payment should be Tk 400 a day to cope up the price hike and other problems,” he said.
