Salt: a sacred spirit, a tradable resource, a life necessity, and a hard commodity to make a living mining. Salt saves dull food, melts ice, rims margarita glasses, eases pains, heals things…an infinite part of everything. Imagine for a second: what if your job is to hand-mine it?
Salt mining typically involves extracting salt deposits from underground or surface mines, and processing it in a way to separate the mineral from the soil. Over the past two hundred years with modern machinery, humankind has figured out easier ways to cultivate it, but there are still remote operations that use human labor alone. If your job is to extract the precious mineral, you are the operation and the laborer.
Most days, you are the only worker out there. Well, you and your kids.
You live in Ouidah, a city and commune located in southern Benin, in West Africa. The region rose to prominence as an exporter of slaves in the 17th century but by 1865, palm oil had entirely replaced slaves in Ouidah's export market.
As you start your work day, the sandy, marshy plane spread out in front of you, dotted with wicker huts and piles of dried grass intermingled between patches of water and land, framed by azure skies above and verdant grass below. Cauldrons of water boil, and piles of sand dot your horizon. All day, your pickaxe rarely leaves your hand. You use it to churn and till the earth, while the hot African sun, sometimes as hot as 100 degrees fahrenheit, or 37 degrees celcius, beats down on your back, your neck, your bare shoulders. Although you can see the salty ocean off in the distance, the cool breeze doesn’t quite reach you.
The muggy air convinces the sand and grit to stick to all parts of your body, even under your skirt. You feel dead and alive at the same time. You stay because you have become good at this trade. You stay because your options are limited. You stay because your kids can be with you. You have just birthed your third child, and since you know no other life, you plug on, even though you have no childcare. Your children play next to you while you work, lost in their own sandcastle heaven.
You teach your oldest daughter to keep an eye on her two-year-old sister and her eight-week-old sister. You tell her she's in charge. When she cries and you pick her up to kiss her face, the salt in her tears graces your lips. The kids are loved, it is easy to see. Although they remain in your sight at all times, it’s just you, the salt, and the kids all day. Your body is salt-logged, heavy from post-baby weight. Your body is sore from bending, picking, and churning. But it is a job. You have heard stories of people who rim their margaritas with salt or throw salt over their shoulders for good luck, and you can't even begin to imagine wasting this hard-earned commodity on something this trivial. For you, this crop yields about 600 CFA per kilo, or 1 USD.