Drying tobacco...

Its another blip as I drive day. Left Mzuzu around 11am to travel to Lilongwe, the capital city, where I have a meeting tomorrow. Its a 5 hour drive and there were many blip opportunities to be had, if I had been a passenger or a slow driver! However I did see this tobacco shed of drying tobacco and actually stopped and reversed to get a shot.

As soon as I stopped, as often or should I say always happens here, people came running from the village to see what was happening. When they saw I was taking a picture of the tobacco there was great hilarity - I am glad I managed to get the shot before they all came in front of it!!

Tobacco unfortunately is the main cash crop in Malawi and this year apparently there has been a good harvest and prices are expected to be good - the auction floors have already opened and on the way down the road I met many overloaded trucks with bales of tobacco. Maybe on the way home I will get a shot of one.

The tobacco industry here however also uses a lot of children as labourers. Usually they are primary school children and I have some pictures of children working in the tobacco fields. One of the NGO's did a major study a couple of years ago which I believe became a BBC documentary, about the effect of this work on the children's health. If I remember rightly, the findings showed that children working with this tobacco were doing as much damage to their bodies as smoking 60 cigarettes a day.

I am not a lover of tobacco and when we find lorries on the roads overturned and tobacco spilled all over the place, the smell almost chokes people as they pass by.

So......there are two issues here - one is tobacco and the other is child labour. As my job is working with children you will no doubt be hearing about child labour in further blips!!

I am sure you are glad you decided to look at my blip today - sermon over! Have a good day!

Just checked the details and child tobacco pickers suffer severe physical symptoms from absorbing the equivalent of 50 cigarettes per day through their skin :-(