Zanzibar Town - Blood on the Stones - Part 2

 Westerners have always been fascinated by the romantic allure of Zanzibar. It was the reason for my spur-of-the-moment decision to visit after a week of work with an NGO in Dar es Salaam. My first encounter with the word, Zanzibar, was as a schoolboy reading and memorizing Bliss Carmen’s poem, The Ships of Yule.  

                               With cocoanuts from Zanzibar,

                               And pines from Singapore;

                               And when they had unloaded these

                               They could go back for more.

      

            Carmen was a latecomer in romanticizing the place. Eusebius of Caesarea, Palestine, a historian and bishop of Caesarea Maritima in about 314 AD wrote this ode to the island. 

                               O take me back to Zanzibar

                               Where I may sleep and dream some more

                               And wake to dawn of cinnabar.

                       

            Perhaps surprisingly, the list of writers who’ve waxed lyrical about Zanzibar includes Allan Ginsberg, Spike Mulligan, Marcus Garvey, E.J. Pratt and Emily Dickinson. As an article in The Christian Science Monitor stated, “There are few places in the world with an evocatively exotic name as Zanzibar.” But, as I discovered, there is a dark side to this idealization. Garth Myers, a former Professor of African/African American Studies at the University of Kansas writes, “Popular Western writings about Zanzibar have been vital to European imperialist domination of the place for 150 years.” In an article, “Isle of cloves, sea of discourses: writing about Zanzibar,” Myers said this racialization and creation of otherness is part of an “Imperial predilection for objectification.” David Livingstone, Reader in the School of Geosciences at Queen’s University of Belfast suggests in his book The Geographical Tradition that “Geography in the age of imperialism was not merely engaged in discovering the world, as it was in creating it.”

            I had to admit that my own understanding of this exotic island was as insubstantial as a frigate bird feather fluttering to the sea. To correct this gaping lack, I decided to walk up the hill after lunch. My destination was the Anglican Cathedral of Christ Church, a soaring edifice of coral stone in the middle of the old town and built intentionally on the former, blood-soaked grounds of Zanzibar’s largest slave market. In fact, the alter is said to be over the site of the market’s whipping post where naked men, women and children were lashed with stinging nettles. The more stoic the slave, the higher the price. There’s a white marble circle on the stone floor that marks this special piece of hell. An adjoining slave heritage centre contains more horrors including admission to two dark, crypt-like cells which were often crammed so full of slaves that many died of suffocation or starvation before they could be auctioned off. Outside in the fresh air, there’s a memorial to the misery inflicted on the people of Africa, a rectangular stone pit at least a metre deep in which five iron figures stand in mute despair, linked in the actual chains that once circled the legs, wrists and necks of slaves. It reminded me of Rodin’s sculpture, The Burghers of Calais in Paris, with one important difference: the slaves hadn’t volunteered.

            The British had been campaigning for years to end the enslavement of Africans and finally succeeded in shutting down this Arab slave market in 1873 after the threat of a naval blockade. The archipelago became a British protectorate in 1890 while still being ruled by the local sultanate. The arrangement lasted for seventy-three years until 1963 when the British declared Zanzibar a constitutional monarchy under the sultan. It lasted for one month. The African citizens, a majority of the population, had had enough. In January, they rose up and deposed the sultan in the Zanzibar Revolution. Blood flowed in the streets. More than 20,000 people were clubbed, shot and hacked to death, and thousands of Arabs and Indians who had dominated the merchant class fled as refugees. The new socialist government created the Peoples Republic of Zanzibar and in April that year, Zanzibar joined with Tanganyika on the mainland to become a new country - the United Republic of Tanzania. Zanzibar was recognized as a semi-autonomous region.

            Today, there are about 1.3-million people on the islands of Zanzibar, 99 percent of whom are Sunni Muslim who live according to Sharia law. The beating heart of Islam lies in Zanzibar City where there are perhaps as many as 50 mosques. They coexist side-by-side with Indian temples and the two Christian cathedrals, and many are tucked into the labyrinthine alleys of Stone Town. Some are beautiful with brilliant, white-washed exteriors and carved wooden doors and staircases; others show their age with crumbling plaster and faded wood. That afternoon, as I was winding through the narrow streets a large door swung open revealing a spacious square inside. Out poured a stream of young girls, chatting and laughing like children anywhere when school is out, all wearing black abayas and white hijabs. They swept by me like a flock of starlings.

            Zanzibar is famous for its doors which are wonders to behold. They are massive, usually double doors, generally made of teak, mahogany or black wood and are carved in beautiful, intricate patterns. Some have large brass studs in a style adapted from India. Others reflect the Omani influence with carved Arabic symbols and passages from the Quran. Swahili doors are carved in simpler patterns yet are still ornate. While many home owners have restored their doors with fresh coats of stain and varnish, others have been left battered and worn by daily use and the elements, the faded paint barely clinging to the weathered wood. Still others of these relics have been snapped up by collectors and shipped to other parts of the world.

            “Some beautiful paths cannot be discovered without getting lost,” said Erol Ozan, an American professor. The narrow alleys of Stone Town are the perfect place to lose your way. They wind in all directions, some take you to dead ends, others spill out onto squares with cafes, coffee shops and boutiques selling colourful African khangas. Still in others, you can stumble upon boutique hotels and restaurants. Many of the homes have balconies on the upper floors enclosed with wooden lattice from where devout Muslim women can enjoy fresh air in privacy and a view of life on the street below. Along the alleys which are paved with stone, there are raised concrete ledges (baraza) running the lengths of many homes. It’s where men can greet and chat with visitors outside without violating their wives’ privacy. I saw many women in groups of two and three, sitting on them, talking, while their children played and rode their bicycles. During the rainy season of March, April and May, the ledges also function as elevated sidewalks when water comes cartwheeling down the narrow streets.           

            Democracy is still a fledgling thing in Zanzibar. In January 2001, the army and police fired into crowds of people protesting the election results. More than 35 people were killed, and at least 600 were injured. Mobs went house-to-house beating and raping. Two-thousand people fled to Kenya. Four years later, there was more bloodshed after the election when nine people were killed. In 2015, the election was declared invalid due to fraud and a re-run the following spring was boycotted by the opposition. Fifteen observers from Europe and the United States issued a statement that questioned the results.         

            Power of a different kind has also been problematic. In the spring of 2008, an electrical failure due to problems with the high voltage cable from the mainland lasted for one month. Then, from December 2009 to March 2010, there was another failure that lasted four months. Without electricity, water couldn’t be pumped to homes or businesses. It was a huge blow to hotels and restaurants which scrambled to buy truckloads of bottled water, fuel, and generators to keep food cold and make ice. The situation was much worse for local residents. Alex Dunham, a South African filmmaker said many residents couldn’t afford to buy water so they began to drink contaminated water from old wells and suffered from diarrhea. In Dunham’s documentary, The Dark Side of Paradise, a doctor in one outlying village said 102 people had contracted cholera and three of his patients had died. 

            It would soon be time to catch the ferry back to Dar es Salaam.  I wandered into The Floating Restaurant which was not floating at all but built on pilings above the harbour near Forodhani Park. It was a beautiful place with a massive deck and a sprinkling of tourists enjoying the late afternoon sun. While waiting for my Kilimanjaro beer, I made friends with a skinny, long-legged cat that looked like its ancestors might have once belonged to the pharaohs. I was saddened by what I’d seen that day. Life here is hard. People are poor, living on the edge. They wore the evidence of their daily struggles on their faces. Where is the hope, I wondered?

            Several years ago, the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar published a sleek 150-page Investment Guide that painted a rosy picture of future possibilities. The economy grew by 7.5 percent in 2017 and the government says there are business opportunities in agriculture, fishing, light industry and tourism. Just as Zanzibar was historically a strategic location for trade, so it is today with ready access to a market of 300 million people in the eastern and southern countries of Africa. It’s the spice industry, mainly cloves, that still provides 45 percent of its gross domestic product while tourism produces 20 percent of the GDP.

            Today, there’s a new crop in Zanzibar that’s driving entrepreneurship and creating wealth: seaweed. Seaweed has become a superfood that’s also used in toothpaste, medicine and shampoo around the world. When the idea to harvest seaweed here as a cash crop was first introduced, Muslim men didn’t want to do it. The women did. Farming the ocean for seaweed has become a lucrative business. It’s freed women to leave their cloistered lives at home and wade literally into business working with other women. The BBC reported that many of the men who were against their wives working changed their minds when the money started rolling in. Suddenly, women had purchasing power and families had better homes, better food, new furniture, and kids had new books for school. It’s given many women a measure of financial independence and has altered the balance of power between the sexes. 

A recent webinar sponsored by The Nature Conservancy and Reef Resilience reported that 23,000 people in Tanzania are now involved in seaweed farming, that 80 percent of them are women, and that seaweed exports are the third greatest contributor to Zanzibar’s GDP after tourism and the export of cloves.

The Kilimanjaro catamaran had a full load of passengers. It eased its way out of port and into the Indian Ocean as the sun sank lower in the western sky. It was still hot. I was at the stern again in the open seats and watched the buildings of Stone Town recede, then the coast of Zanzibar as we sped toward the mainland and Dar es Salaam. I looked for the ferry guy and was relieved when I didn’t see him. Still, I wished him well. 

Zanzibar Town: Blood on the Stones - Part 1

     There was something sketchy about the guy. The way he sidled up to me at the stern rail, crowded in way too close. He had shifty eyes, brown skin, slim, with short black hair, maybe in his twenties. I was quite possibly a mark -- tourist, white, much older, head and shoulders taller. Nevertheless, I made sure my daypack was tucked safely between my legs. My digital SLR camera was in there. I’d read the warnings to travellers.

            Directly below us, the high speed ferry unspooled a boiling wake that carved a long white furrow across the Indian Ocean. Sprinkled here and there on the glittering water, weather-beaten wooden dhows with stained and patched lateen sails criss-crossed the sea as their crews fished. If we hadn’t been on a sleek, 35-metre catamaran travelling at 22 knots, the scene could have been a thousand, maybe two-thousand years old. We were out of Dar es Salaam, as the sailors say, bound on a quick day trip for the storied island of Zanzibar. As we headed north, the Swahili Coast of Tanzania lay low and green to the west until it finally disappeared.

            I understood that different cultures have different ideas of personal space, but I didn’t trust this jittery kid with the furtive eyes. I kept a close watch on him until he finally left, disappearing into one of the large salons on the boat. The massive ferry – named Kilimanjaro – was modern and pristine with three decks of comfortable seating including open air sections forward and aft, and inside, luxurious cushioned chairs in economy and business class with air conditioning and television. The ferry was part of a fleet built by an Australian company for the billionaire owner who had been born in Zanzibar.

            Our early morning passage would take two hours. Plenty of time to imagine the people who’ve sailed these historic waters. Archeologists found stone tools on Zanzibar that were made by Africans from the mainland who’d risked the 30-kilometre journey 22,000 years ago. They were followed over the centuries by traders from Yemen, the Persian Gulf and from India. Some stopped and married into the local population. Vasco da Gama planted the Portuguese flag on the island in 1499 and it soon became part of their colonial empire that lasted for two centuries.

            Zanzibar Island (Unguja in Swahili) is part of an archipelago off the east coast of Africa. It’s a strategic location with ocean access to the entire eastern flank of the continent, the Middle East to the north, and to India and Sri Lanka across the Arabian Sea. The island also has arable land, plenty of fresh water, and a natural harbour, all of which explains why so much blood has been spilled on its sandy shores. The Sultan of Oman threw out the Portuguese in 1698, planted vast plantations of cloves and the islands became known as the Spice Islands. Their fragrant cargo was carried away on sailing ships to markets around the world. 

        The sultan had two other resources to export: ivory from elephant tusks and slaves from the mainland. The Sultan rulers of Zanzibar imported as many as 50,000 African slaves annually. Some they kept to work in the fields, the rest they sold to the Arab world, India and beyond. According to Islamic jurisprudence, free Muslims could not be enslaved and so in the countries of Islam demand was high for this cheap labour. According to the BBC, an estimated 17-million Africans were sold into slavery in countries on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa. Historians claim the Arabs were especially brutal. In Zanzibar, as many as one-third of the slaves died every year.

            Over the years, merchants on Zanzibar added gold, frankincense, weapons, silks and turtle shells to their list of goods for sale. The island became the commercial capital of East Africa. The ruling sultans and wealthy traders built a new town out of blocks hewn from coral and so it became known as Stone Town. Awe-struck sailors wrote home about its beauty as they approached from the sea. But when they got closer, the stench of garbage, excrement, and rotting bodies filled the air. Once ashore, they were greeted by the threat of tropical and venereal diseases and the sight of skeletal slaves dying in the streets.

             It was just the salty tang of the ocean that greeted us as we sailed into the harbour under a cloudless sky. A couple dozen dhows large and small were moored in quiet water. Some were fishing boats, others were used for freight or ferrying passengers among the islands of the archipelago. Many take tourists out on day trips to dive and snorkel among the reefs or to visit the island’s vast white beaches. The ocean front of Stone Town is lined with ornate and stately buildings many hundreds of years old, a melange of styles built by Africans, Arabs, Portuguese, Indians and Persians. They face a boulevard dotted with palm trees that follows the serpentine seawall. The rich beauty and history of the architecture prompted the United Nations to name Stone Town a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2000. Further up from shore, the spires of the Anglican and Catholic Cathedrals and the minarets of mosques rise above the neighbouring three and four-storey stone buildings. To the north of the ferry dock, the harbour is devoted to shipping, with huge cranes hovering over stacks of multi-coloured cargo containers ready to load or unload.

            Once the ferry docked, we disembarked into a large, open air reception area where Customs and Immigration officials of the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar, stern-faced as they are at any border these days, demanded to see our passports and vaccination certificates. After being waved through, the next hurdle was to navigate the crowd of shouting taxi drivers and travel guides offering their services. I didn’t need either. Guidebooks, government websites and bloggers warn travellers not to take any taxis here unless pre-arranged by their hotels. The same goes for hiring would-be tour guides. Tourists can be targets for robbery, kidnapping and sexual assault.

Out on the street, I stopped to admire the beautiful buildings across the road, but first I needed to find an ATM to withdraw more Tanzanian shillings as the ferry company hadn’t accepted credit cards.          I walked along a main road that skirted a fetid marsh choked with reeds and strewn with a magnificent array of garbage which someone was burning in smouldering piles. I was grateful for having taken my malaria pills and shots for yellow fever.

I approached one bank but the two armed soldiers standing guard said there was no cash machine there. Down the dusty road another block or so, I found a bank with a small, glass-enclosed ATM. I stepped inside and withdrew more cash. As I turned to go out, I almost ran into the guy from the ferry, the one who’d crowded in so closely. He had just taken a step to come in. I was surprised to see him.

“Habari,” I said (hello in Swahili), and walked past him and out to the road, my daypack slung over my shoulder. I’m not a timid traveller but quickly realized what might have happened. Stories are legion here of tourists convinced by the sharp point of a knife at their backs to withdraw their daily limits and hand over credit cards and PIN numbers as well as their passports. I wondered what Canadian passports were worth on the black market. About US$2600 or more according to a newspaper article I read later.

            I turned east, strolled uphill on a street lined on both sides with stores selling plumbing supplies, hardware and clothing. It was a beautiful morning. The area wasn’t busy, just a few knots of local men in their kanzu and kofias chatting over coffee while women dressed in abayas and hijabs opened up their shops. I was simply wandering about checking out the town, seeing how people lived. I was happy to be there, smiled and said Habari, but noticed that while some nodded only a few smiled back, just a couple of mumbled hellos. It was easy to understand. They must grow weary of gawking foreigners with their pockets full of money.

            I continued up the road then stopped and looked behind me. There was the guy from the ferry again. He was on the other side of the street. He saw me watching him. I turned and kept walking, then stopped and looked. He was almost directly across from me. Was I being stalked? I stood still and waited as he walked past, and as he did, he motioned to someone up the street, pointing to his head as if to say, “He’s onto me.” I couldn’t see the other person, so I stayed there until the guy moved on, then turned and walked back toward the harbour.

            Tourists from so-called developed countries need to be more than careful here. Common sense and humility are required. In the Zanzibar archipelago, one of every two people live below the poverty line. The average annual income is US$907. One lens in my backpack – just the lens – was worth double that. It was an easy decision to leave my camera in the bag.

            It was time for a coffee. I headed to The Old Dispensary just across from the ferry terminal. It’s a four-storey wedding cake of a building with carved wooden balconies, elaborate cornices and an exuberant amount of gingerbread. I walked through the huge wooden doors into a courtyard paved with stones and open to the sky. I sat at one of the tables, enjoyed a coffee from the southern highlands of Tanzania and admired the balconies on the upper floors that overlooked the courtyard. Birds flew freely in and around the massive pillars. The friendly waiter told me it had once been a charity hospital for the poor built by a wealthy Indian trader in the 1880s. Later, it became a dispensary, providing basic medical care and medicines. Over the years it deteriorated until The Agha Khan Trust restored it in the early 1990s. It was a cool oasis, a perfect place to check my guidebook and map.

            I can’t resist an old fort and so downed my coffee and walked south along Mizingani Road, the stately route that follows the harbour seawall. Ngome Kongwe, Swahili for old fort, is a brooding beast of dark coral stones. It was built by the Omanis at the end of the 17^th century to protect the town from the acquisitive Portuguese. It’s the oldest building in Stone Town and looks it. The decrepit hulk contains a large inner courtyard lined on two sides with the kiosks of local artisans selling clothing, purses and other souvenirs to tourists. Up a flight of ancient stone steps to the top of a circular tower, a cultural centre sold work by local artists. I bought three small ink and water colour pieces from the artist who painted them – a dhow at sea, a pair of massive wooden doors, and a street scene -- which are now framed and hanging on my living room wall. Adjacent to the square within the walls of the fort is an amphitheatre for live dances, musical performances, and movies shown at the Zanzibar International Film Festival.

            Two of Stone Town’s architectural jewels are right next door.  The House of Wonders (Beit-al-Ajaib in Arabic) was built in 1883 as the Sultan’s palace and became the first building in Zanzibar to have electricity and an elevator. Next to it, the Palace Museum or Sultan’s Palace (Beit el-Sahel) is a group of buildings that includes the palace and the sultan’s harem. The palace was built in 1832 in the Omani style – formal simplicity with local materials ­­­­-- and was home to the local sultans until the Zanzibar Revolution. The museum contains roomfuls of the rulers’ rich furnishings, including ornately carved wooden chairs, settees, Persian rugs, four-poster beds, and oil paintings.

            The fort, House of Wonders and Sultan’s Palace all face Forodhani Gardens overlooking Stone Town’s sea wall. It’s a small, well-kept park with a white band shell and green lawns where several local teens were hanging out while a couple of older men were enjoying naps on the grass in the warm sun. At the edge of the quay were two take-out food kiosks. I stopped at Café Foro and ordered grilled fish and rice and spent a pleasant lunch at an outdoor table watching boats, dhows mainly, coming and going in the harbour. Among the handful of people strolling by were a well-dressed Arab man and two women wearing fashionable abayas and hijabs. I wondered if they were his wives.   

See Part 2            

Twenty-first century hunter-gatherers

Article and photographs by Rick Book
From http://calgarypickers.blogspot.ca/ May 2011

Bang. Rattle. Clink. The metallic jangling seems right outside the living room window. It’s 5:30 as I peer into the dark of a Calgary morning. There’s a man in a parka, hood up, hunched into the slanting snow under a streetlight, ploughing through powdery drifts with a grocery cart half full of bouncing bottles and cans. Even the homeless work hard here in the West.

They call themselves pickers, a hardy subset of the 4,000 men, women and children who are without a roof over their heads on any given day or night in Calgary. Look in any back alley in the downtown core - from where the Bow River winds past downtown to the lower Mount Royal district seventeen blocks to the southwest, look in winter or summer, rain or blinding snow, early morning or late at night, and chances are you will see pickers, 21^st century hunter-gatherers prowling with shopping carts and their punky cargo of bulging garbage bags. If there’s a cart parked beside a dumpster and there’s no one in sight, chances are the picker is inside it, up to her ass in fragrant garbage, ripping through bags filled with lettuce leaves and coffee grounds and rancid scraps of meat, searching for bottles and cans that will earn a few cents at the local recycling depot. You see pickers, too, on the street at any hour, digging through sidewalk garbage cans, their hands black and cracked and full of cuts from jagged edges and broken glass. Sometimes, not often, you see them resting on park benches, coaxing the last drag out of a soggy butt scavenged from the sidewalk. If you try to look pickers in the eye, make human contact, some have the stone cold stare of a gated community, others simply look away, a few will size you up as the bleeding heart you are and ask for money. 

To a newcomer, their presence is jarring, incongruous within sight of the city’s shiny petro towers and the luxurious offices of oil and gas tycoons who run this town. To pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstrap Calgarians, the continued presence of pickers seems either mystifying or a pesky nuisance. It’s not that the homeless here aren’t looked after. I never saw a picker who didn’t have a warm winter parka. At night, many of them bed down on mats at any number of shelters run by the city, charities or religious groups. But there are many homeless men and some women who avoid those places. They sleep “rough,” squirreling themselves away in “camps” - dark doorways, condemned houses, underpasses, in the thickest bushes of city parks, and under dilapidated front porches where there’s an opening big enough for a dog or a person to crawl through.

Calgary introduced a city-wide recycling program for residential areas in 2010, but it doesn’t include the forest of apartment buildings in and around the downtown area. Some of these buildings are served by private waste and recycling companies. Many aren’t, and so the residents toss their recyclables down the chute and into a dumpster with the rest of the garbage. Some people take their bags of recycling to neighbourhood collection depots, a row of green bins often located behind a big name grocery store. Many separate their pop cans, milk cartons and wine bottles and put them into bags for the pickers who station themselves at these collection bins. That’s how you meet the pickers; in some cases, like mine for instance, it’s how conversations – and friendships - begin.     

 Franklin

“Franklin” is the alias he uses. It’s the name on his Safeway Club card: Franklin I. Annoni, a wry, sardonic joke. “It means frankly, I’m anonymous,” he says with a grin. He hangs out by the green recycling collection bins behind Safeway, on the morning shift. The first time we talk, he tells me he’d been a land surveyor for oil and gas companies, marking out new drilling leases in the bush up north. We have something in common. I tell him I’d spent a summer during high school working with my uncle on a survey crew in Saskatchewan. Franklin liked the solitude of the bush, away from people, he says. He is short, stocky, with a cherubic, deeply tanned face, and a warm smile that reveals missing front teeth. Somehow, Franklin manages to keep himself and his clothes quite clean. To see him sitting there, you might not know he was homeless. But his grocery cart gives him away, with its growing assortment of cans and bottles, several bulging garbage bags slung from the side, the large roll of mustard-coloured foam lashed to the front, and curiously, a blue fabric softener jug in the child seat.

One warm spring day we sit in the sun and chat over chicken sandwiches and juice. Franklin had been a boss, had his own survey crew and truck, but in 1967 decided to give up the career, just work as a helper. In between survey jobs, he played pool, going back to the bush when the money ran out, did that off and on for 30 years. “Snooker was my game,” he says proudly, “played for money. That’s all I did.”  When he finally lost the strength in his legs and feet and could no longer thrash his way through the brush, he retired. “I bought myself a gold watch,” he says. I wonder if he still has it. Doubt it.

Franklin says he’s been picking for three months, “the new kid on the block” he calls himself, then contradicts himself saying he’s been picking steadily since April. That would make it almost a year. He’s been homeless since then, he tells me, started picking on his seventieth birthday. Perhaps time is an amorphous, shifting thing when you’re on the street. Perhaps truth is, too. He doesn’t look close to seventy.

Much of Franklin’s life is fenced off. No wife, no kids, he says but he lived with someone once. He’s also been arrested, spent 26 months in the Calgary remand centre, he won’t say why. “They make it very harsh in there, to encourage you to plead guilty and get it over with.” Maybe that’s why he won’t let me take his picture or record our conversation. He watches me scribbling notes and asks to see the article when it’s written. And why should he trust me? Whitebread, middleclass stranger wanting to shoot pictures and tell stories about his life, his decline. I’ve thought about that myself.

Many of the pickers sleep at “the D.I.” - The Calgary Drop In Centre, The Mustard Seed or Salvation Army, but not all. “There’s a whole bunch of unknown people, and I’m one of them,” Franklin says, “we truly live under the sky, don’t want to be connected to any institution. They’re dangerous places, even if you take your shoes off; you have to tie the laces around your legs so they don’t get stolen. You can get lice, all kinds of diseases. The only time I got sick was when I stayed there.”

We talk about money. Pickers get refunds on containers that held anything drinkable. He rhymes off the list: pop, milk, wine, liquor, water, energy drinks -

in cans, plastic, paper or Tetrapaks. They get 10 cents for each, 25 cents for containers a litre or more. “Weekends are the best times for picking when people are housecleaning,” Franklin says. He won’t tell me how much he makes a day.

I ask him what people do with the money. Most buy alcohol and cigarettes, he says; alcohol is number one, as people can usually pick up cigarette butts on the sidewalk. “I might like to have a drink but I only start drinking when I’m back at my camp, often with dinner.” Later, he tells me that he drinks half a bottle of wine a day. What percentage of the pickers have an addiction, I ask. About 95 percent, he answers, then thinks for a moment, maybe 99 percent. ”My personal interest is books, Second World War. But I can’t haul too many in the shopping cart. I really love history.” He regularly visits three used book stores in the area

Franklin gets the old age pension, $530 a month. His rent used to eat that up. Then there was a “mix up” in his income tax, and he was cut off supplements. That extra $516 a month in federal and provincial supplements doubled his income, he tells me. But now it’s gone. “Clifford Olsen is getting $1200 a month,” he says, resentment rising in his voice at the injustice. Someone at a seniors club is trying to clear up the misunderstanding and get Franklin his “back pay.”

I ask him what’s in the green garbage bags tied to his cart. “I have three sleeping bags,” he says, “I put one inside the other in winter, it’s warm and soft.” He bought the foam at Army & Navy to put under him in his camp. He either hides the foam in the morning before he leaves to go picking, or else ties it to his cart, otherwise it might get stolen. He has a bag of winter clothes which he’s not using but still has to carry around. “I’m living out of my cart,” he says.

Franklin won’t tell me where his camp is and what kind of place it is. “I don’t have nine-foot ceilings,” he says with a grin. “My ceilings are infinity.” He does say that he uses scraps of plywood as a windbreak. “I leave my camp while it’s still dark and don’t return till it’s dark again – so no one will see me.” He has gone into Safeway to use the washroom but other pickers will steal the bottles and cans from his cart. “Now I have this jug (the blue bottle) to pee in,” he says, “so I won’t have to leave my cart unattended.” Sometimes he has a friend, another picker, watch it for him. I get the impression that’s risky, too. As we talk, someone sets down an empty wine bottle while they stuff their recycling into slots in the big green bins. Franklin waits till they leave, then scurries over to pick it up.

From time to time, a white Calgary Police Services van or car cruises by the recycling bins. The officers know many of the pickers by name. The police are often a problem for us, Franklin says. “There are so many charges they can lay against us: trespassing, loitering - like what I’m doing now, open liquor, drinking in public, public intoxication.” He hesitates. “There’s another one, too, but I don’t want to give them too many ideas.” He laughs.

Pickers often need a place to rest; it’s hard work pushing those loaded carts around all day. But Franklin says they’re banned from many properties, even church steps. Behind Safeway, it’s okay to sit on benches or on the brick borders around the landscaping. “I was sitting resting in an empty parking lot last week and the manager just came up and kicked me off,” he says.

Franklin talks about a homeless friend, a woman, who was determined to get an apartment. For several years she collected stuff for a home and squirreled it away in a crawl space under a porch: dishes, cutlery, glasses, lamps, vases. Franklin speaks wistfully of her. “She was friendly, very popular among the people on the street. She got her apartment. Now she isn’t in contact with any of us. She made it.”    

I ask Franklin a question, maybe a stupid one: What do you want to do?  “We live from day to day,” is the answer. “We can’t make plans. We need storage lockers for our carts; that would be something if they could do that. They have lockers at Brentwood and Shaunnessey (Calgary’s light rapid transit C-train stations) for bicycles, but they’re too small for carts. If we had lockers, we could lock up our carts and go look for a job, then get an apartment; it would reduce addiction. We can’t go shopping for clothes. We can’t go to Value Village to get bargains. We don’t have the mobility. We’re stuck.”  

Rosie

Rosie, too, parks her cart near the collection bins behind Safeway, against the white fence of the house next door. She usually shows up at around 11:00 a.m., stays till 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. – the afternoon shift. Rosie is thin with jet black hair, wears a light black leather jacket and walks with a severe limp. She’s got a brace on her right leg, and on bad days she uses the black cane she keeps in her cart. Rosie has a sweet smile and an alarming number of scars on her face that map the rough road she’s been on. I’ve been visiting with Rosie once or twice a week for more than a year. More than once she’s had a black eye, bruises, fresh stitches, a split lip.   

Unlike Franklin, Rosie is happy to tell me her story. “Four years ago, I got kicked out of my house where I was paying rent. Why? Because I was drinking too much and not doing the responsibility thing, so the owner of the house said, okay you gotta move now. He didn’t give me 24 hours, didn’t give me anything, just said get out. So I left there, went to Peter Lougheed Park and slept there in my shorts and a jacket. The first night I was out there, this guy came up to me and said, you got a crack pipe? No, I said. No, I don’t do that shit. I’m an alcoholic. And he kicked me in the face just because I didn’t have a crack pipe. I was like, holy shit; this is what the real world is all about.”

“It’s been like this for the last four years. Thirty-four times I’ve been attacked. I’ve been robbed, I’ve been beat up if I don’t give my cart over. And for what?  Money for food, smokes, beer? It’s all the same thing. The bad homeless will fuckin’ do that. Okay, I’m going to roll you, just because you got this and I got nothing.”

“When you’re out on the street, okay, you can go to the cops, but you know what? When you come out, it’s even worse because they (other pickers) consider me a rat. Oh yeah, because I’m hurt. Oh man, the last time I got beat up – September 12^th – two boots in the head, one right here, (points to her cheek below her left eye). I’m very fortunate that I never lost my eye, but I have to go to the doctor because someone’s wrong with this right eye, big time.”

“I’m a soft bottle picker,” Rosie says, “because I got this bum knee. I can’t do anything. I hurt this when I was 13.” She’s on a list for knee replacement surgery. “I’m not using my handicap as a crutch,” Rosie says. “I used to have a bike and run around. I had my own route and I did that every day. Winter is the worst, she says, because of the cold. “But you get this thing in your mind, okay you gotta do this. You’ve got to. You don’t have a choice. It’s either that or you’re going to have no money, no food, no nothing. You have to keep going a step at a time.”

I asked Rosie about Franklin who’s here in the morning. “There’s conflict,” she says. “Cause he knows I been here, and he’s trying to take over the territory. I don’t give a shit.”  But I know she does. It bothers her a lot. On some days, I’ve seen him stay well into the afternoon and get the lion’s share of bottles, while she ends up with very few.

Last fall, Rosie told me she was going to rehab. She was gone for about a month, then one day she was back. I ask her about that. “I went to detox for eight days, then I went down to rehab in Claresholme for 18 days. But the only reason I went there was the last beating that I had. That’s what made me go.” Rosie’s partner convinced a social worker to come talk to her. “She kneeled right in front of me and said. ‘Are you ready?’ I said ‘Yes.’” She begins to cry. “The amount of pain I went through.”  

“I did it, and I was totally focussed when I got out but this is what I came back to.” She points to her cart. “This is my home. This is what I do. And it’s hard to separate and go forward. And I’m still going through that. It’s really, really hard.”

Rosie talks about the number of people she knows, friends, who’ve died on the street. “I can’t tell you how many people died,” she says, and begins to rhyme off their names. “Harold, Benjamin, Thomas, B.J.” She stops. ”The list goes on and on, I don’t even want to mention it.”

After almost four years on the street, Rosie now has a small apartment in the northeast part of the city, provided by an organization that supports the homeless. She takes the C-Train and bus every day to get downtown to her picking spot. She describes her first night in the apartment after being on the street for so long. “The fridge motor turned on while I was sleeping. I woke up. ‘What’s that?’ It freaked me out.”

One day, Rosie shows me a legal-sized pad of foolscap covered in handwritten notes. It’s guidance from her social worker on how to improve her relationships and her ability to manage the ups and downs of her life. She reads the entire page to me as she stands by her cart, her voice full of conviction. It’s an impressive list. I wish I had a copy.  

Later in the spring, I stop by to visit. Rosie is shaking as she lights a cigarette. There’s a fierce look in her eye. She’s angry. Her friend, Willow, who’s been hanging with her lately during the day, has also been sleeping at her place. “She stole money from me while I was sleeping,” Rosie says. “Everything I had.”

Before long, Willow shows up and Rosie confronts her. “Where’s my money?” “What?” says Willow. She denies everything, and claims it must have been someone else who was sleeping there. I wonder how many people there are. Their voices rise, Rosie’s in hurt and accusation, Willow’s in defiance and denial. I walk away as they sort this out. I don’t see Willow with Rosie again.

Willow

Willow is not her real name. Other pickers have warned me that she’s bad news, untrustworthy. I find her friendly, articulate and full of life. I’m told she’s in a relationship with a member of some gang, and that she sometimes sleeps at Rosie’s apartment for a break, for safety. She won’t talk about it. “Too dangerous,” she says. “They would kill me.” I believe her.  

“There are some people that are not here right now that are real monsters,” Willow says. “And they don’t care. She’s (Rosie) seen me hanging around with the worst people.” Rosie nods. “We couldn’t even speak before, I wasn’t allowed to talk to her, wasn’t allowed to be nice.  There are a lot of men who are really trying to intimidate. And it’s called street justice, you know. Rosie’s seen me beat up and bleeding, too. Why don’t you guys go pick and leave the ladies alone?”

“It’s that karma thing,” she says about life on the street. “One day we’ll have lots, we give, give, give. Some days we can’t even find a butt because it’s raining, it’s snowing. Then the next day, some passerby gives us money, but we’re not panners. On the street, it’s panners, and then you got the hard core pickers, you got the lucky people like us that get recycled or donations. Pickers that go up there, trudging those alleys, oh yeah, hat’s off to them. Winter, dragging their carts. Minus 40, I was out here, it took us how long? Over an hour just to get over to 10 and 6 (the address of the downtown recycling depot). Hauling at this. You got to switch arms, right. No need to get a gym membership, seriously.”

We talk about addictions that account for so many people on the street, and about treatment. “Somebody can’t say ‘you have to go to treatment.’ You’ve got to do it for yourself. Otherwise, it will never ever work. If they’d offer me a million dollars, I don’t care, I’d check myself out the next morning. Ten minutes, don’t watch me, I’ll be out the door. I don’t want your money, I just want your respect.”

Some of the homeless eventually get an apartment. I ask her how that happens. “You have an addiction for alcohol, drugs, gambling, whatever. Where there’s addiction there’s street people. I could go away and be perfectly happy but there’d be one thing missing: my family out here, okay? People that’d die for me. Make sure I’m okay. You can live in a million dollar mansion and never really know your neighbours; they think they’re better than that. I said to a cop, would you die for your neighbour? The cop says, no. I said guess what? I’d die for mine, without even thinking about it. So there’s the difference. You got a million dollars? You owe the bank, I don’t owe nothing. It’s true, you’re all running around thinking you’re big because you have a credit card. We don’t owe nothing, so we can sleep at night, peacefully.”

I tell her that I hear more laughter among the pickers than I heard in the company I worked for. “And it’s whole-hearted you know. It really is. We laugh loud and sometimes people call 9-1-1 and say there’s a disturbance. The cops show up. They say, what? There’s a disturbance because they’re laughing?”

But that’s on the good days when the sun is shining. “You have to keep drinking out here just to keep going,” Willow says a few minutes later.

Joseph

Joseph is an old man, in his seventies I guess. He’s tall, with a soft, quiet voice and the gentlemanly demeanour of a grandfather. He’s been on the street for a very long time. “People ask me if the streets are rougher now or in the 70s and I’d say in the 70s. In the 70s, I was shot twice, stabbed three times before I was 20. I’m still here.” Joseph has a home now, an apartment and he’s cut down on the drinking that brought him to the street. “Now I just have a couple of beer, one or two beer a day.” The day I met him, he was going to St. Mary’s church for a Sunday afternoon meal. He seems happy with his life now.  Joseph likes to ask his friends, “What’s good about your day?” Then he’ll tell them what’s good about his. “Well, I woke up and I’m still breathing. Still walking.”

Mister Hapi and Barbi

They arrive like one of those Chinook weather systems, a blast of laughter rolling in on a blue scooter on a sunny afternoon. They call themselves Mr. Hapi and Barbi and pull up by the collection bins to visit Rosie, Willow and Joseph who was just passing by. Their energy is infectious, turning it into an instant party. But just as quickly, the mood evaporates as they talk about their lives.

“I was raped last May,” says Barbi, with astonishing frankness. “I’ve been robbed, jacked, you name it. I’ve been on the street since I got out of the pen in 1998.”

What did you do? It seems an obvious question. “A whole lot of everything, drugs, assault, I used to be pretty nasty:” I like a girl who doesn’t beat around the bush.

Barbi is still picking, this Safeway location used to be her spot. “I gave it to Rosie because she needs it more than me,” Barbi says. The woman isn’t more than a metre and a half tall and tells me about one of the hazards of picking. “When we go into bins, we stand on the garbage bags - you wouldn’t believe the stench. We pull the bags apart to look for cans and bottles and spread them on the floor, so the level of bags drops, which means I can’t climb up on them to reach the top. I was stuck in one for three and a half hours one day. Good thing I took three beers in with me.” Her laugh is deep and hearty.

She and Mr. Hapi now both have apartments thanks to the local Home Base program that helps people get off the street. “It’s subsidized,” Barbi says. Pays $725 a month. “I’ve had cancer, diabetes, arthritis, I’m a recovering drug addict, now I’m just a drunk…Home Base, they pretty much saved my life.”

In spite of his name, Mr. Hapi has nothing but vitriol for agencies like The Mustard Seed and the Calgary Drop In Centre. “You’re just a piece of shit,” he says “They build you up one day and knock you down the next…In any city in Canada, they feed you, they clothe you. Here, they treat people like shit. The bullshit and the money come first, you come last.” Mr. Hapi has volunteered at both agencies. “They get $100 a day from the Alberta government for every homeless person they serve, “he says. “They’re in it for the money. That’s all. They dislike me because I know the truth.”

Barbi backs him up. “I got shit because I fed the homeless,” she adds. “I took food outside and fed them and they gave me shit.”

Harold

Harold is a tall, soft-spoken man whom I walk with one day. He worked in a small manufacturing plant until it closed down. More recently, he washed dishes in a couple of Calgary restaurants. On the way to the recycling depot he tells me that he lost his jobs in both restaurants “due to a misunderstanding.” Like most westerners, Harold looks you directly in the eye. He agrees to have his picture taken, but as I look through the lens at his sad face, I feel like a trespasser.

Harold’s got a big load, after four or five hours work. We line up at the recycling depot with about twenty other pickers. They unload their carts at long metal counters. The depot employees on the other side of that counter are like machines in a noisy factory. Their hands, in thick rubber gloves, fly as they take in, separate and count bottles and cans faster than I can follow. A young depot worker with a Bite Me T-shirt scrawls a number of a piece of paper, gives it to Harold; he takes it to the manager at the cash register who pays him in cash from the till - $42 this trip. Harold leaves his cart in the depot parking lot; there are always carts there. “I’m going to Macdonald’s to get a coffee,” he says as we shake hands. Then he hurries off down the street. I look for him for days but never see him again.            

  

Darren

It was an unlikely conversation in an unlikely place. One cold, grey late winter morning, I see a picker heading away from me far down an alley. He disappears for a moment as I stride to catch up to him, then reappears beside a dumpster. He’s wearing a baseball hat, reflective sunglasses, an orange down vest. I introduce myself, tell him what I’m doing and he agrees to chat. His name is Darren. “I’m a carpenter and a trail guide,” he says. “I’ve been packing mules and guiding for 25 years, all through the Canadian Rockies, up to Jasper, Banff, all over the place there, into some part of Montana. But 12 years ago I caught my arm in a wood splitter and I just kind of let go of everything. It really fucked me up and since I been on the streets for so many years, I’m just kind of forgetting that I’ve been a cowboy all my life.”

Darren reaches for a small backpack in his cart, unzips a pocket and pulls out a digital camera. “I’m an artist, too,” he adds. “A painter.” And, as we stand there in the alley next to his cart, he gives me a show of his paintings on the small digital screen. I’m impressed. I don’t know much about art but they look pretty good to me.    

“Acrylics,” he says. “I keep my art at the Mustard Seed. They have a small studio there.”  He tells me he had an art show at Grace Presbyterian in January. “Sold half of what I painted. I took cotton bed sheets, doubled them, coated them with gesso to glue them together, and as soon as it was wet I put it on a big board and just started painting. I did up a whole bunch of them. I set them on a table, people were buying. I painted 13 and sold six of them. Aside from the one double one I did, none of them were over a hundred dollars. I just made them affordable. Make them big enough, and affordable. Paint ‘em fast, big enough, and they say: ‘Only a hundred bucks! Sure.’ Decent.”

Darren invites me to the Mustard Seed to see more of his work. We agree to meet there the next night. I walk with him for a bit as he heads for the recycling depot to cash in his bottles. On the way, he sees Joseph, an older picker, resting on an empty sidewalk planter. Darren says “Hi,” stops, reaches into his backpack, pulls out a can of beer and gives it to him. Joseph nods and smiles his gratitude as Darren quickly walks on. “We have to take care of each other out here,” he says.

The next night I watch Darren paint in the basement studio of the Mustard Seed’s Creative Centre. He’s standing with his palette and brush looking every inch a painter in front of a large canvas on an easel. There are a half dozen other people working on various art and craft projects at a large table, and a couple of volunteer assistants from “The Seed.”

“I’ve destroyed a bunch of them,” Darren says while I shoot some photos of him painting a bucolic mountain scene. “Sometimes when I don’t have a sale and have a bunch of them, I’ll just get rid of them, bust them up, instead of holding onto them. They’re no good if they’re just sitting there doing nothing, I have no way of packing them around.” I think of how much art the world has lost by disconsolate artists’ own hands.

Darren tells me more about his accident. “It was an auger on a wood splitter, and now I got four pieces of steel in my left arm. So I went and bought every tool known to mankind and built myself a little wood shop. I had an old 18th century railway caboose in my backyard; that was my woodshop and studio. I had a two-bedroom house I was renting, the one back room I used for my painting, taught myself everything, and had four computers running in there. It was my school.”  After teaching himself how to draft, Darren used a computer to design furniture which he’d build out of pine. When he got divorced, his wife went back to Ontario, took their daughter with her. He followed them for a bit, but then came back west.

“I’m going to spend some of my summer in Canmore and Banff this year,” Darren says, “so I’m going to go back out there, take it from there and see what happens.”  I ask him about the chances of picking up work as a trail guide. He shakes his head. “No. The last one, I didn’t appreciate all the stealing that was going on. So I just wound up quitting. Anyways, I don’t have any equipment any more now, I’m just going to study my art, just load up some paints in my backpack and just head out there.”

I ask him what it’s like for him on the street. “I’m used to it,’ he says. “I’m pretty well by myself. I don’t get myself too wound up on too many people. I’m more independent. I hide, so to speak. I just pick my bottles and have a few beer later on, that’s about all. But eventually, I’m hoping work will pick up, and that way I can get back into something affordable where I can live.” What kind of work? Painting? Trail guide? “I’d probably just continue with the construction end. I’m good at it.” 

You’re good at painting, too, I say. “Painting is such a hard issue to keep going with, people fighting me with it. Why? I don’t know. People have a lot of  jealousy about my work, especially, people ask me why’s a guy like you that good doing in a place like this? .Well, that’s what happens I guess. I’m on the streets. What do you expect?”

A few weeks later, Darren sends me a note on Facebook. He’s in Banff and is having a rough time. He writes once in a while. I don’t know how he’s getting by.   

Todd

It’s evening and a heavy snow falls in huge flakes like torn paper. I’m in a back alley with my camera and spot a picker with his cart in the distance, his parka hood pulled up. He is heading south, away from the recycling depot, with half a load still in his cart.

As I get closer he stops to fiddle with something in his cart. I walk up and introduce myself, tell him I’m what I’m doing, mention the names of other people I’ve spoken with. He’s tall, maybe six-three, his face red and raw with wind and cold, his reddish-blond hair and goatee are wild and straggly. I’m a little surprised that he’s willing to talk. “I used to be in management at a pharmaceutical company,” he says. “I’ve been picking for about seven years.” He sleeps rough, not at the DI. “I don’t like those centres. I get sick if I stay inside, like at my brother’s place.” We talk a bit more, and then I ask if he’d mind if I give him some money? “I’m not going to refuse,” he says. We both laugh.  I hand over a few loonies and toonies from my pocket; it feels like a stingy amount.

He tells me his name is Todd, takes off his leather gloves and we shake hands. His hands are rough and ice cold. I feel his gloves, they’re leather, sopping wet. After a while I ask if I can take his picture and he agrees. I pull out a release form but his hands are so cold he can hardly write, his signature a frigid scrawl. At one point, he reaches for a clear glass bottle in his cart. It looks like urine, I wonder for an instant if he’s going to throw it at me, but instead he takes a swig. What’s that? I ask. “Beer,” he says, and takes another. “You need to drink out here.”

I take a few shots as the snow comes down and show him the photos on the digital screen, trying to be as courteous as he is. What does he think seeing himself in that photo? How does he feel? I pull off my dry fleece gloves and offer them to him. “Here, “I said, “You need these. They’re nice and warm and I’ve got more at home.” He takes them gratefully, struggles to pull them on his cold hands. I reach for my wallet, pull out the only bill, a twenty, and give that to him. “For something to eat that will warm you up.”

He thanks me. “I’ll go to the Purple Perk (a local cafe) tomorrow,” he says. “They have fish and chips on Friday.” We shake again and leave. Todd trundles south and east toward wherever it is that he sleeps. I put my hands in my pockets and head for my nice warm home. As the snow sifts down, it is all I can do to keep from crying.        

Joe

One day late in the fall, I’m on my way to Safeway with recycling when I see a half-full cart beside a dumpster just off the sidewalk. I look around. There’s no picker in sight. I walk up and start putting my bottles and cans in the cart. I hear a sound and look up. A man stands up inside the dumpster. “Do you want these bottles?” I ask.

“Yes, yes, thank you,” he says. Of course he does. We get talking. He tells me he’s from Toronto, Italian, left there 30 years ago. He wears a wool toque, is in his sixties, short, very friendly, well-spoken. We end up chatting for 20 minutes about football, Canadian versus American, three downs versus four. We introduce ourselves. His name is Joe. 

I look for Joe after that, see him only fleetingly crossing a street or going down a back alley, never when I have my camera.  A couple of months later, we meet near a Tim Horton’s. His face is haggard and his shoulders slump. He’s in rough shape. “Can you buy me a coffee?” he pleads. “I haven’t eaten today.” I give him money, all the change I’ve got and a five. “Thank you,” he says brightening. “I’ll get you back.” 

A few weeks go by. I’m walking over to Mission Street to buy pasta at a little Italian market when I see Joe walking toward me with his cart on the other side of the street. I call out to him. “Hi,” he says and waves me over. He starts rummaging through a knapsack in his cart. I wonder what’s he’s looking for. He pulls out a can of fruit juice, Five Alive, hands it to me. “Here,” he says, “I owe you one.”

“No, Joe, you keep it.” 

“No, no,” he insists. I accept, thank him and take the can gratefully. “How are you doing?” I ask.

“Oh, fine, fine,” he says and I can tell he wants to get moving. We go our separate ways. I look at the can in my hand. It’s encrusted in crud, probably from the garbage where he found it. I walk a few blocks and then, with a mixture of gratitude and guilt, set it on top of a garbage can where another picker can find it.
                                                                            - 30 -

A report from the President of the Calgary Homeless Foundation:
http://calgaryhomeless.com/assets/Progress/Year5/Five-Year-Update-to-10-Year-Plan.pdf