2023-06-17 21:25:34
Bikash Lama deals with people and their workforce. “It used to be easier. When I drove through the villages, everyone wanted to go back to Kathmandu to work on the brick kilns there. Today everyone hopes to earn money from tourists in their villages,” says the Nepalese. He’s sitting in front of a huge kiln, piled high with red bricks, that opened a few days ago. Now the workers carry the orange-red bricks to a storage location. Lama is a Naike, the word for “boss” in Nepali, and he hired the porters.
They, in turn, are seasonal workers without a contract, insurance, or pension, living off the promise of their Naikes. When the monsoon comes, they return to their villages. Now Lama collects her yellow paper cards, stamps every brick march. “Everything depends on their strength. They manage between a hundred and 300 marches in one day,” he says. Then he presses the next stamp on the card in an outstretched hand, covered in red brick dust.
The brick kilns in Nepal are booming. After the 2015 earthquake, there is still a lot to be rebuilt. More and more people are moving to Kathmandu, driven by the consequences of climate change and the hope of finding work and education. So the city grows deeper and deeper into the valley basin. Here, too, the poor souls from the country live first under tarpaulins, then under corrugated iron, finally in a living room built of bricks. The brickworks located around Kathmandu benefit from this. They have settled above the clay pits. The country is eating itself up here: once the brickworks have burned the clay in the pits, they move on – everything here consists only of burnt bricks, which are stacked like Legos to form warehouses and ovens fired with wood or cheap coal from India.
Thousands toil around the kilns like ants
Their red chimneys soar high into the sky. But dramas take place on earth. Thousands toil around the huge kilns like ants. In South Asia, experts at the transnational International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu estimate that 150,000 brick factories produce more than 310 billion bricks a year. Nepal’s 1,300 brickworks alone contribute a good 2 percent to the country’s economic output. On the other hand, they emit more than 1.3 million tons of greenhouse gases every year. Many workers have black lungs. A diplomatic report in Kathmandu speaks of “hell on earth”.
Dishit works in this “hell”, the Bungmati Brickworks. She carries 28 burnt stones on her back with every walk, some of them still warm. The path from the kiln to the warehouse with millions of bricks is around 300 meters long. At the end, Dishit and her colleagues climb 20 steps, which – like everything here – are made of burnt bricks. At the top, on the top layer, she twists and squats to set her load down on the last tier. The skin of her hands has cracked from the rough bricks. Face and clothes, feet, everything disappears in the brown dust. Men arrange the new ship. The respite lasts only seconds. And already Dishit has made his way back down to the oven.
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