By Yero S. Bah
Sarro is a site located just at the outskirts of the Gambian capital city Banjul, and next to the famous Denton Bridge linking the Westfield-Banjul main highways. A huge heap of groundnut shells is located at this site. Women from different parts of the metropolis work at the said groundnut shells to make a living.
Sarro is also known to many Gambians and even non-Gambians including high ranking central government officials, private sector, NGOs, ordinary citizens and local government authorities, as it can be easily spotted on the roadside along the busy Westfield-Banjul only highway. Gambian women, mainly from poor financial backgrounds, can be seen toiling there daily from dawn to dusk, trying to make ends meet for themselves and their families.
Among them is Rohey Gibba who has been working at Sarro for over 30 years now. She sells groundnut dust to clients who are mainly animal owners such as cattle, donkeys, goats and sheep within the Greater Banjul Area.
“We do not charge fix prices but we fill bags of groundnut shells for our clients, and they give us any amount at their disposal,” she explained.
Gibba, an old woman in her 60s, said she does this type of work because there are no better economic activities that she could venture into, and cried over illiteracy.
“At my age now, I should have been sitting at home doing something else better than
this job,” she pointed out. Lack of water at the site for drinking and bath is a major problem for these women. Speaker after speaker pleaded on the government and philanthropists to help them with water tap, lamenting they usually cross the busy
Westfield-Banjul highway to fetch water from nearby neighbors, which always expose them to dangers on the road.
Rohey recalled that, one of their colleagues, Horta Sambou, was killed by a vehicle approximately ten years ago, when she was trying to cross the highway to fetch water on the other side of the road. The site has turned into a little hamlet of its own, in every respect, as makeshift huts are erected in various positions on the site. These huts, made from bamboo grass, sheets from bags of rice and plywoods, serve as resting places, and sometimes night bedrooms whenever they could not find transportation to their various homes.
For 12 years, Haddy Marreh has been working on the Sarro site selling groundnut shells to clients as others would do daily, hoping to raise some cash to give out daily ‘fish money’ to the family and to meet other expenses.
“We are just trying to make a living here,” sorrowfully she remarked. Several people have visited the place, including prominent personalities such as the First Lady Madam
Fatou Bah-Barrow, who donated some bags of rice and other condiments to the women at the site, sometime this year.
However, these women want government to look into their plights which include lack of water and transportation.
Gibbel Fye revealed that, sometimes they go to work empty-handed and return home empty-handed due to the nature of the work at the site which entirely depends on clients.
“We are really suffering and need financial support to do other works different from this one,” Fye lamented. “We sometimes go home dirty because of no water to take bath or drink here,” she added. Some of the women are also into soap making and this helps them to raise more income to complement their work at the Sarro venture.
The groundnut shells come from the Sarro groundnut company that decorticates groundnuts and dumps the shells at the Sarro groundnut shells dump site. Initially, the groundnut shells were burned, but in recent years, that practice had been stopped because the shells are needed by other people and the Sarro women are making a living from it.
Meantime, all the women at the Sarro groundnut shells dumpsite have, through Mansa Banko Online, appealed to the government of the day and philanthropists, to come to their aid, in the provisions of potable drinking water and a vehicle for transportation.
