JEDDAH, 16 April 2007 — With an aim of stopping the habit of people rummaging through bins, Jeddah Municipality is planning to replace the current open orange dumpsters with new covered ones. The move is set to tidy Jeddah up and put the city’s notorious bin-ladies, who salvage rubbish, out of work.
“The new dumpsters are sealed and leave only a little space for people to dump their rubbish,” said Imad Bukhari, head of the Cleaning Projects Department at the municipality.
Bukhari added that the municipality has, together with the Passport Department, organized a schedule to carry out sporadic raids to stop people rummaging through the rubbish. Bin-ladies and other garbage diggers are known to empty dumpsters leaving rubbish lying in the street.
Garbage diggers, who are mainly of African and Asian backgrounds, have become part and parcel of Jeddah’s scene. They can be seen across the city going through other people’s rubbish looking for items including aluminum cans, glass, plastic and wood that can be sold to recycling factories.
The southern part of the city, where most illegal immigrants reside, has a large concentration of garbage diggers. Ahmad Al-Qasmi, a Saudi living in the Al-Nuzlah district, said that garbage diggers always leave rubbish lying on the pavement close to his home. “It is very annoying and unhygienic,” he said, adding that on many occasions he has had to chase people away and asked his building keeper to look out.
Abdullah Abu Saad, a Palestinian living in the Ghulail district, said that even though the sight of people rummaging in bins is an annoying one, he nevertheless feels pity for such people.
“Those people do not dig garbage for fun, they need to earn a living,” he said, adding that whenever he sees someone going through the bins he gives him or her some food and money.
Arab News met a young Pakistani girl, who was going through a dumpster in Madain Al-Fahd district. The young girl had a small rusty trolley with her full with items gleaned from other dumpsters.
Though she didn’t seem eager to talk, it was clear from her appearance that she was forced to do what she was doing.
There are no official figures on the number of bin-ladies in the city. At one riyal for every five kilos of cardboard and one riyal for every two kilos of aluminum, bin-ladies scrape a living from what is other people’s rubbish.
Most bin-ladies come to the Kingdom from African countries for Haj and overstay. They sell their travel documents on the black market to raise money and then look for a place to call home. For them, home is usually a single room, shared with two or three other families in the most dilapidated and crime-ridden areas of the city. In some cases, there are as many as 12 people living in a single room.
In a previous Arab News article, an official at the Passport Department said, “Suppose we go out and arrest them all. What do we do with them then? Which countries do we send them to? One woman says she’s from Chad one day, then the following day she says she’s from Niger. Even using languages and dialects to judge where they’re from isn’t 100 percent reliable. You can have a citizen of Niger who has lived in Chad all her life and come to Saudi Arabia to perform Haj. If we go by her dialect, then we would send her to Chad, which isn’t her country. Without her telling us, we won’t know she’s from Niger. If we put her on a plane to Chad, she won’t be accepted there because she has no citizenship documents. She will simply be sent back to Saudi Arabia.”
In the past deportees that were flown to “their” countries were denied entry and sent back to the Kingdom because they had no paperwork or were not citizens of the country they had arrived in.
For the most part, the bin-ladies leave the public alone and are left alone. Nevertheless, there are occasional complaints relating to the condition of pavements and bins after rummaging has taken place.
