intact
“I will break rocks until I die.”
At the rock yard in Lichinga there is no retirement. There is only an eternal showdown between mountains of granite and women made of steel.
When Mari and I visited it was hard to tell the difference between rock-hard human and mountain. In spite of more than their fair share of hard knocks, neither has lost its voice. The stone sang along in an accompaniment of clanks while the women lifted their voices as well as their buckets.
The singing belies the scene, however. The women who work the rock yard make almost no money, not nearly enough to support a family. Several have absent husbands, drunks who deposit their wives’ income in more Travel Gin. Many women feel like they have no choice but to work there, and it is backbreaking work, work we Americans assume you must wear plaid and a beard to perform.
But these women are stronger than their rocks. Even if in her lifetime a woman has received a beating, her face is somehow less weathered than the mountain’s. Her spirit is still intact. But for many women, their prospects are in pieces beside their rock piles: on the one hand there’s Maria, a child worker who wants to be a nurse someday, and on the other hand is Luisa, a middle-aged woman who told us, “I will break rocks until I die.”
It’s resilience in the face of an erosive wind: poverty, sexism, and pain.
No retirement, but eyes that look unflinchingly into whatever future will be.
——
I came to the rock yard hoping to photograph a raw aspect of life here in Lichinga. The women and children of the rock yard work from sun-up to sundown carrying and breaking rocks that will be sold by the pile for pennies.
The women were not impressed with my equipment and were quick to drag my face out from behind a now dusty lens and send me to the mountain, bucket in hand. My frustrated attempts at explaining that we weren’t here to carry rocks were simply lost in translation.
With my camera gone I was forced to stop looking and capturing, and to start seeing and living. With new eyes a yard became a community.
A project became a narrative.
A subject became a woman named Maria.
If I learned anything, I learned that it takes more than a morning and a few dozen frames to capture an image or gather the words to write its story. It even takes more than feeling its weight run through your shoulders.
Like my feeble attempt at breaking rocks, these pictures only scratch the surface.
