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B. comes to meet me in a long, beautiful flowered red dress. Wavy black hair, smooth black skin and a voluptuous figure that hustles me into a passing taxi. We drive down Kira Street, down Kampala Rd. and into downtown Kampala at peak hour. I haven’t seen this yet – not since last year – the busy stores, the packed streets, people passing the beautiful child begging, as if retarded, jerky, stick-sized arms, in the middle of the sidewalk, people passing. S. says they’re always there. The drug addict talking to the stone wall, reminiscent of downtown Montreal. We get off and take another taxi. This one almost gets away. I jump into the front, pushing a man with a heavy briefcase to the side, as we’ve already begun moving. The policemen pulls us over and gives the driver a ticket. We switch a second time. I fall asleep between three other people.

We get off about 20-30 km from Kampala’s city center. We’re standing on a paved road surrounded by tin shacks and small stores, some selling freshly carved bed frames. Pointing, B. shows me the rock quarry. It sits way above the slums, carved into the side of a high, once green hillside. We catch two boda-bodas and begin our ascent negotiating the thin alley-ways and potholes.

When one steps out of the cramped slums, the quarry does seem the top of the world, or at least suburban Kampala. I can see the spread of tin-shacks and sturdy cement houses, a smog-choked paved road, the red potholed side roads. And of course, the quarry.

We walk up the hill to where women are sitting on their knees banging stones with flimsy hammers. Behind them there’s a massive pit. To the right, fires in caves under stone walls and young men keep emerging and disappearing into the smoke. One man stands on top the rock banging a piece of metal wedged into the rock with his hammer. Pieces of rock crumble away under heat and pressure.

The dislodged pieces of stones are hauled from the pit by the women. They fill their little yellow jerry cans full of heavy stones and carry them on their heads out of the pit. They dump the jerry cans on the edge of a cliff hanging over the pit. Children and women gather around and start banging at the stones. Once the stones turn to gravel, they can sell each jerry-can for 7 cents. On a good day, especially when their toddlers and ten-year-olds help, they can make 8$.

B. introduces me to seven of the 18 women. These seven women fled the war in Northern Uganda six years ago. Now they sit banging rocks in the Kireka quarry. Their young daughters will soon join them full-time as they graduate to primary school and secondary school fees cannot be paid. The women are far away from their previous network of family and friends – essential for survival in Uganda.

Their husbands all died from AIDS or during the war. The women have not been checked for AIDS, neither have their children: medication and doctors are expensive luxuries. One little child, the daughter of a beautiful women dusty with chalk to her elbows, has beautiful wide black irises in pools of yellow pupils. She holds my waist as I scratch her back, B. points at her eyes, not hollow, but sick, attentive, but tired.

Another woman has had a lip infection for six years: the upper length of her lower lip is bald and pink, a startling contrast to her smooth black skin. A hospital recommended glycerine which made it worse. She’s given up going back: time and money are too short. She can’t eat mangoes or sugar cane, cheap staple food.

Two-year-olds play in a smaller pit. It looks like it might of been fashioned as a crude, ironic playground. The toddlers will end up joining their mothers in a few years. Sitting at the quarry hitting rocks from the dirt pits. One little girl wears a frilly white dress, another little boy holds his hands, clasped together over his swollen stomach. His shirt splits open at the bellybutton. He moves thoughtfully. Another woman, wearing bright blue cloth wrapped around her head brilliant against her black skin, hammers at the rock, her left breast heavy and slipping through the holes of her torn blouse.

Regardless of circumstances, the women are beautiful, friendly and welcoming. As we first walk up, B. is greeted by a wiry woman wearing a pink shirt, bra-less, blue jeans and a blacksmith’s apron around her waist. She shakes my hands and I feel the thick calluses of her thumbs and palms. She smiles broadly and nods to the pieces of my English she understands. She introduces me to her fellow women, the six other displaced ones. They work together at the quarry and raise their 20 children together. Despite being in a group, their incomes are meager. They eat one meal a day; they send their children to primary school only when they can spare the labor; they will never make enough to buy land or buy into a different business.

Sitting near the edge of the pit and next to a pile or rock is an older lady. You can never tell ages in Africa. I can’t tell she’s crippled either until B. point to her son and his friends. They stand, an awkward gang, around B. waiting for her permission to lift their mother, mother’s friend from the ground. The rickety wheelchair is hers. Her son and his friends push her up the hill in the morning and down in the hill in the evening. It seems a cruel joke that this small damning gesture could be such a favor to her and her child. She sits cracking stones, legs crumpled underneath her, 12 hours a day.

All of these women’s husbands have died of AIDS or during the war. The women say they’ve been checked, but B. seems doubtful. The children haven’t been tested. It’s not like they would have the money for doctors or HIV medication should they be positive. The women with the lip infection stands there as I ask if she’s been eating properly (a stupid question to ask, however, she says, strangely enough, that she eats one meal a day, balanced). I ask if she’s been tested for HIV. She says yes. It could be the dust clouds that rise from the rocks then, or the thick black fog from the fires underneath the stone walls causing her pain. It could be the heat of the day and the sunshine high up in the sky and she hits rocks with her hammers through what should be her lunch break.

S. asks me later: “why help these women?” After all, Uganda – as everywhere in the world – is full of men, women, children who are stuck in the deepest trenches of poverty. The poorest of the poor are generally not helped by development programs that target education, water, land development, technology and further on.

These people at the quarry, their families and generations after will remain in the same trench of poverty since their work generates absolutely no extra capital and many have lost the supporting incomes of their families and husbands. Most are illiterate, have too many children to feed, and are not aware of what kind of assistance or welfare programs (should they exist) that they might have access to. Women are the most vulnerable.