The tough life of Cape Verde's stone-breakers

Young people go every day with their calloused hands to smash granite rock at Cicada Velha, a hillside village to the north of Praia, the capital of Cape Verde. "The life here is as hard as the stone," one of them said. "I've been working in this quarry every day from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm. I began at the age of 20 and now I'm 45," stated Domingo, the oldest of the labourers, who have no gloves and sometimes no shoes. The Cape Verde archipelago, home to renowned singer Cesaria Evora, lies off Africa's western coast and combines volcanic rock with lush valleys and sandy beaches that attract tourists, but daily life is difficult for many of the 510,000 residents. "Life in Praia has become as hard as the rocks we break. It takes a lot of courage and a lot of hope. At sunrise each day, men and women head off either for Praia or the quarries in search of our daily bread. That's the rhythm of our lives," Domingo said while he cracked a piece of rock The dry village of about 100 inhabitants, which is reached by a winding road through the hills, has a few small shops and several "casa de pasto", simple Brazilian-style seafood restaurants bordering on the Atlantic Ocean. "It rains very little here. The soil is arid and the earth doesn't feed anybody," Domingo added. Like his workmates, he says that each day he breaks about a tonne and a half of rock into granite slabs and gravel, which is sold to civil construction firms or to the Praia municipal authority, for road-building. "We sell the slabs for two escudos (two euro cents) and the gravel for 50 escudos (45 euro cents / 65 US cents) for each barrow-load. We don't have the choice," said another stone-breaker, Pedro Cunha. "The (Praia) town hall buys the slabs on credit. Sometimes we have to wit several days, sometimes even months, to get our money," Cunha added. "There is no work here. The government promised to open workshops for young people. But we have not seen any of that," Arlindo Santos, an unemployed youth with no particular training, said. Like many Cape Verdeans, Santos left school very early to emigrate. A year ago, he was expelled from Luxembourg for lack of a resident's permit and he disclosed that since then, he has turned to the bottle. "My life isn't made to live here. I don't have the strength to break stones like some," Santos told AFP, taking a swig of his "grogo", the local rum. The president elected on August 21, Jorge Carlos Fonseca, recently told AFP that more than 45,000 youths are unemployed, while more than 130,000 people live below the extreme poverty line. "The government's policy to employ youth has not yet taken effect. That's why I'm basing my programme on the modernisation of the economy and of the state. We need to enable investors to come and to create jobs," said Fonseca said, who is backed by the opposition Movement for Democracy (MPD). At the polls, he defeated Manuel Inocencio Sousa of the ruling, socialist African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde (PAICV) with 54.16 percent of the votes to 45.84 percent for his rival. Providing jobs was one of the main themes of the presidential election campaign. In the past decade, the PAICV has overseen growth averaging six percent, with a spate of development work including international airports and hundreds of kilometres (miles) of roads. Lauded as a model of democracy and good governance in Africa, Cape Verde in 2008 became only the second ever country after Botswana to be promoted by the United Nations out of the ranks of the least developed countries. But joblessness and ill-paid, back-breaking labour drive many Cape Verdeans to emigrate. According to World Bank estimates in 2009, about 700,000 Cape Verdeans lived abroad, which is nearly 200,000 more than on the islands.