Mali: There are worse things than life on a rubbish dump

Hawa Drame, known to her friends and colleagues as “Madame Refuse,” sifts through the rubbish on a dump in the Malian capital Bamako for rags and old clothes that she can recycle and sell in order to feed herself and her four children. Drame, who is now about 40, has been scavenging for old rags on Bamako's rubbish dumps for the past 13 years. She washes them in a river and sells them on to mechanics and garage owners for cleaning cars. A Malian government survey in 1999 revealed that 63.8 percent of the country's 11 million population were living in poverty and a further 21 percent in extreme poverty.