sells a roll of 6 meters for USD 6, and makes a roll a week. This means he is earning less than a
dollar a day, but says this is enough to meet his most basic needs, in addition to finding what
he needs on the adjacent municipal rubbish site. He has an impressive field in which he grows
enough food to survive, with a very good crop of sweet potatoes being harvested at the time of
interview. He sells the surplus. He has lived at Ngozi Mine for 16 years, and says that his
current house is better than the one he had before the demolitions.
Two other residents of Ngozi Mine are ingeniously melting down plastic bags to make statues
of wild animals and human figures. These black, life‐size sculptures are true, if rather unusual,
works of art, although the creators bemoan the problems of finding markets. They have great
pride in their workmanship, but the fact that they are living in cardboard houses points to the
fact that it remains very difficult in Zimbabwe these days to make a living out of craftwork!
However, these ingenious artists/ wire makers are creating a very polluted environment for
their neighbours, who mentioned that they were going to have to knock down their shacks
and move to where they were upwind from the black and toxic fumes caused by the burning
of tyres and plastic bags….
Photos 20 to 23: artists in Ngozi Mine live in cardboard houses while they carve intriguing
sculptures – here, a fish eagle, kudu, leopard and humans –
all made out of melted plastic collected from the adjacent rubbish dumps
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