LUSAKA, Zambia — The boulders here are hard enough that the scavengers who have taken over the abandoned quarry south of downtown prefer not to strike them directly with their hammers.
They heat the rocks first — with flaming tires, scrap plastic, even old rubber boots — so that the stones will fracture more easily.
At dusk, when three or four blazes spew choking black clouds across the huge pit, the quarry looks like a woodcut out of Dante.
A boy named Alone Banda works in this purgatory six days a week.
Nine years old, nearly lost in a hooded sweatshirt with a skateboarder on the chest, he takes football-size chunks of fractured rock and beats them into powder.
Lacking a hammer, he uses a thick steel bolt gripped in his right hand.
In a good week, he says, he can make enough powder to fill half a bag.
His grandmother, Mary Mulelema, sells each bag, to be used to make concrete, for 10,000 kwacha, less than $3. Often, she said, it is the difference between eating and going hungry...
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