Welcome to the Other Side: Trash, Sweat and the Price of Dreams

By: Augusta Osmatu Bangura

So, I have dreams. I always thought we all did…

I never stopped to consider what it truly means to be without them, to wake up each day not chasing your own future but fighting to secure someone else’s. To live in a space where hope no longer belongs to you, but must be transferred, protected, and paid for through sacrifice.

By the time most of Freetown is still stretching awake, Mohamed is already on the streets, unseen, uncelebrated, yet essential. He drags behind him a battered cart, piled high with the city’s refuse. The smell is suffocating, the labour relentless, but each step he takes carries the weight of determination and purpose. It seems like generations ago that he dreamed of becoming a lawyer, but then life intervened. Now in his mid-forties, he labours daily, moving from street to street, his cart his constant companion. He rises each day with one thought: his children must never end up like him. He labours with the grit of a man who has been denied his chance, daring to dream again through the next generation.

For more than twenty years, Mohamed has walked the streets collecting what others throw away. That is his curriculum every morning, not opening shops or going to an office, but chasing what others discard without a second thought. “I started this work during the years of former president Ahmed Tejan Kabbah,” he explains. “Organized waste collection was beginning to take clearer form in the country.” It is work people often notice only in its absence. Garbage disappears, and no one asks where it went, who cleared it, or whose hands sorted through what everyone else had already rejected.

Dropping out of school after the death of his primary caregiver feels like it happened generations ago. Today, Mohamed is a father of four. Every bag he lifts, every drop of sweat, is in service of one hope: that none of his children will watch their future evaporate because the person holding it together is suddenly gone. The price he pays is steep. Society often looks at men like him with the same contempt given to thieves, addicts, or men without discipline or drive, a label thrown too easily, landing on everyone whether deserved or not.

Still, he says dignity does not come from public opinion; it comes from doing the right thing regardless of how you are tagged. “This is honest work,” he says. “I could have chosen other paths, easier ones, quicker ones, but I didn’t.” At the end of the day, Mohamed’s labour, however heavy or looked down upon, puts legitimate money in his hands and that is what matters. He returns home with the satisfaction that another meal has been earned, another school morning made possible.

Mohamed’s wife is a trader on Sani Abacha Street. Together, they build survival from whatever honest work presents itself. None of it is glamorous or prestigious. They may never know what it is like to receive accolades or applause, but perhaps that is what true dignity of labour looks like. It looks like pushing a cart endlessly through familiar streets, returning home exhausted, the smell of a city’s waste clinging to the skin. It is paying school fees for four children in small amounts to keep them in school. And even though it goes largely unnoticed, it is no small thing.