Shafeeq Masih faced an impossible choice at the brick kiln outside Lahore where he had worked his entire adult life. He could remain trapped forever by a debt the owner claimed stood at 900,000 rupees, or he could sell the only thing he had of value: one of his kidneys.
The stranger who arrived at the kiln promised him 400,000 rupees. When Masih woke from the procedure, he received 300,000 rupees instead. He handed all of it to the brick kiln owner. Two years later, according to a Guardian investigation, he remains as deep in debt as before, but now he struggles to work through the pain in his side. "They see us as slaves," Masih says. "We just have to obey."
Across Pakistan's brick kilns, thousands of workers are being coerced into selling their organs, according to Syed Ayaz Hussain, a lawyer for the Bonded Labour Liberation Front. The Guardian interviewed seven victims in a single day. "You can find workers who have sold a kidney at almost any brick kiln you visit," Hussain says. "The whole country is doing it."
A billion people aren't a statistic - they're a billion stories. For Sania Bibi, who started making bricks at age 10, the story spans four decades. Her family initially owed 200,000 rupees. Forty years later, the owner claims they owe 3.5 million rupees - 17 times the original amount. When a stranger offered her money for a kidney, she saw it as her children's only escape. "He showed me many dreams," she recalls. She received 100,000 rupees, far less than promised. "My children couldn't get freedom. My heart's broken."
By some estimates, between 4 million and 5 million people work at brick kilns across Pakistan, many trapped in debt bondage recognized as a contemporary form of slavery. Owners provide cash advances against future wages, but these loans are "seldom documented, often deliberately manipulated, and subsequently become tools for prolonged exploitation," according to Pakistan's National Commission for Human Rights.
