Muntasir Abdul Baqi may have a thankless job for most of the year, but during Haj there are more fruits to his labor. The middle-aged Sudanese plumber is one of the men in Makkah that help keep the municipalityâs sewage system working. During the annual pilgrimage, he says plumbers find all sorts of lost items beneath the many toilets at the holy sites. âMy friends and I have found gold in underground places in Mina,â said Baqi. âI have personally found many cell phones, gold bracelets, rings, watches and other interesting goods that are just laying there in the dark.â
Every toilet in Mina lays over a large room that connects to the main sewage system. Human waste falls into these rooms and flows to the pipes that connect to the sewage network. During Haj, millions of people use these toilets, and many lose items into what they must perceive as virtual black holes where all that enters is lost forever. âWhen people go to the toilet, it is quite often that they drop some of their belongings. Due to their weight these items donât flow into the pipes,â said Baqi. âEach season we go to clean the sewage rooms underneath each camp and we find a wealth of goods.â
Since people have already left for their countries, and there is no one to whom to return these items. In most cases they are considered one of the few bonuses of a dirty but necessary job. âAll plumbers in the area fight each year to get the chance to clean the sewage in Mina,â said Baqi, who estimates that thousands of riyals worth of lost items can be found by plumbers who clean these sites.
Khaled Saeed, a camp operator, said that once his phone fell into the toilet. He called one of workers in the camp and offered him SR300 to go down and retrieve the lost item. âWhen the man emerged from the sewers, he had four different phones including mine,â he said. âWith the thousands of toilets in Mina, the amount of goods that can be found must be worth a fortune.â
Baqi agreed. âIâve been working as a plumber in Mina for four years and I donât want to leave this job any time soon,â he said.
YJCMTSU.