Inside a Colombo tea auction house! Buyers bid on tens of thousands of lots of tea per week. Graders ensure the quality of tea sold. Auctioneers hunch over computer screens monitoring bids in real time. A lot of the tea ends up on supermarket shelves, including in Australia.
Deep in Sri Lanka’s mountainous tea country, a group of nuns have for years quietly helped the children of indentured tea pickers. They serve hot meals, help with school work and give room and board to young children whose parents can’t provide for them.
Today we met a woman who has worked on a tea estate for 19 years. She doesn’t earn enough to feed her family some days. All she has is tea dust to offer her children when they return home from school. She questions the meaning of her life, and why she is on earth. Her hands are torn and bruised from long days pulling tea leaves from plants. She works in thongs, navigating rough brambles and thorns to make her daily quota.
Day four slowly learning more about and interviewing workers on Sri Lankan tea estates. Today we visited an estate school, where the children of tea pickers are educated. Some children drop out to join their parents in the tea fields.
This country is so beautiful and people are so kind. Everyone goes out of their way to help us. Nandri 🇱🇰
Spent today on the vast tea estates of central Sri Lanka. Tea plants cover rolling hills and lush valleys. The pickers, which are nearly all women, scale steep and treacherous terrain to pluck leaves to be sold to companies like Lipton and Twinings.
Pics from today in the mountainous central province of Sri Lanka, where a large part of the world’s tea sold by major brands is grown.
Beautiful scenery and people 🇱🇰
Wearing a balaclava, and wielding a walkie-talkie and heavy leather whip known as a sjambok, every morning at 4am Faith (call sign Mangope) stalks the narrow streets of Alexandra township.
The single mother-of-four is a founding member of her community night watch — a group of mostly unemployed vigilantes who patrol in the early hours looking for copper thieves.
Theft of copper wiring in street lighting, power cables and phone infrastructure has reached a crisis point in Alexandra. But years of police inaction have left residents feeling frustrated and alone.
When Faith and her team catch a thief in the act, they use their sjamboks to beat them until they confess to their crime – a process they call “marinating”.
“As we are whipping them, we say ‘we are going to eat you!’,” she said.
According to the group, copper theft in Alexandra has dropped significantly since they began patrols four years ago.
A group of men burn rubber electric cabling to extract the copper inside next to a railway line in Cape Town. Spotted this scene from a highway bridge this afternoon 🔥🐎
