October 28, 2008

LAHORE, Pakistan | Six-year-old Ali Reza Khan spots a half-eaten apple and steps toward it, darting when another boy makes his move. In one quick swoop, he picks it up, wipes it with a soiled sleeve and takes a bite.

It's 7:30 a.m. at the city garbage dump, and the hunt is on.

Several truckloads of refuse soon arrive, and Ali tosses aside the rind to join a frenzy of Afghan children who depend on the bounty hidden within each steaming mound to support themselves and their families.

Known locally as "ragpickers," most were born in Pakistan after their parents fled the violence and economic hardships that continue to worsen across the border.

Pakistan's own economy is on the brink as the government seeks an emergency infusion of cash from foreign donors, but the country remains home to 1.8 million Afghan refugees seven years after the overthrow of the Taliban.

Despite the filth on which these children tread, most insist they are better off mining trash for money than going home.

"I don't want to do this all my life, but right now I have no choice. There is no work in Afghanistan," said Naqibullah Ullah, 14, peering from beneath a red Dale Earnhardt sports cap.

By some estimates, Pakistan's large cities have as many as 25,000 ragpickers, perhaps 70 percent younger than 18. The vast majority are young Afghans like Naqibullah, who has plied the same waste patch along the Ravi River for five years.

Not long after he was born at a camp outside the southwest border town of Quetta, his family migrated to Lahore, Pakistan's second-largest city, in search of better prospects.

His father died of an illness three years ago, leaving him to look after his mother, two younger brothers and a sister who now accompany him on his daily rounds.

From dawn till dusk, 700 to 800 dump trucks rumble into the site spilling trash and belching smoke. The children typically spend six to eight hours a day scavenging on behalf of junk buyers, who pay 3 rupees, the equivalent of 4 cents, per pound for glass, 8 rupees for paper, and up to 10 rupees for polyethylene bags, the scraps of choice.

Naqibullah swears it's possible to earn nearly $5 in a 12-hour stretch if the pickings are prime and his legs hold out, though on average he earns about $1.25.

Although this involves sorting through shards of glass, rotten meat and hospital waste, the scavenging nets up to $40 a month, what some low-level laborers and domestic servants here earn.

At the end of the workday, Naqibullah and his siblings walk five minutes on foot to their squat -- a tarp enclosure inside the walls of a half-built brick compound. Outside, his mother, Fatima, serves a dinner of bread and lentils around a small fire. Mounds of old shoes and plastic bottles fill the yard.

Khalid Butt, an instructor at Government College in Lahore who has spent the past year researching the Afghan ragpickers, said they are "specialized in their job" since they are free to make their own hours and be among their own people, and still make enough to get by.

Working under a Pakistani employer is tough for refugees, he adds, because it usually requires someone to vouch for you, and can lead to situations in which people are trapped and forced to work more for less.

"As bad as it may seem, they have some ownership over their lives," Mr. Butt said. "And they appear generally OK doing it, meaning life in Afghanistan must have been pretty bad for them before."

The Afghan exodus dates to the war against Soviet occupation from 1978 to 1989, which caused more than 6 million refugees to flee to Pakistan and Iran. Thousands more left amid civil war in the early 1990s that ended when the Taliban took over and imposed an oppressive interpretation of Islamic law.

Others were displaced during the U.S.-led invasion that ousted the regime in late 2001. Many went back at the end of the war, but an escalating Taliban insurgency has since paralyzed much of Afghanistan, which has dropped to five places from the bottom in the latest U.N. development index.

Tens of thousands of refugees remain in more than 80 camps near the border, where the U.N. refugee agency provides basic education, health care and water sanitation. Yet fewer than half of the refugees from the overall population still live in these camps, said spokeswoman Vivian Tan, suggesting that many Afghans have "integrated quite well economically" as day laborers.

"They have found their way on their own," she said.

The Pakistani government had planned to repatriate all of its Afghan refugees by the end of next year. It now says it may revise the deadline in light of the deteriorating security situation, while the United Nations and both countries have agreed that the process must be "voluntary and gradual."

In the meantime, the Society for Human Rights and Prisoners Aid -- a Pakistan-based human rights agency -- is lobbying the government to affirm the legal rights of Afghan refugees, who at times are subject to harassment from police and territorial locals.

The organization has arranged legal representation for some Afghans, and the head of Lahore's waste-management department recently affirmed their right to work, said Qaiser Siddiqui, a program officer.

These developments may come as some relief to Khodadad Khan, Ali Reza's father, who left the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif five years ago. Word had traveled through the emigre pipeline that trash collectors in Pakistan were paid almost twice as much as in Afghanistan, a rumor that proved true.

He has since gone back three times to visit his extended family. Although he's "bothered" by the labor he and his children do, he says the alternatives are worse at home. So he will stay as long as he can.

Naqibullah has yet to make the trip but hopes to, "Inshallah [God willing]."

"We still love our country with our whole hearts," he said, "even though we've never seen it."