The Fallen Read Online Free PDF

12
     
     
    The cream SUV skidded to a halt at the entrance to the mine.  Children with no shoes and dressed in rags ran to the car shouting and laughing, “You! Pen. Mister. You pen. Pen. Money, money.  Hungry, hungry.  No food.” 
    Tim knew that those who could dance around the car were never the ones who needed help the most.  These kids were probably run by some Fagin lurking somewhere in the background.  Asefa tried unsuccessfully to shoo them away but that only made them laugh harder and turn their begging into a game.  Tim raised his hand to stop the children from grabbing at it but they mistook his action and instinctively cowered, a reaction clearly ingrained in them from a short life of beatings from strangers and guardians alike.  He felt guilty and pulled out a pack of gum which he gave them.  The children cheered and immediately started fighting over the prize, allowing he and Asefa to break free.
    Asefa smiled shaking his head.  “Timmy, you gave in.  I thought your years in the field would have turned that soft heart to stone by now!”
    “The compassion fatigue hasn’t robbed me of all my charity just yet, you mean old bastard.”
    They walked towards the mine.  Mine workers in ragged clothes ambled about carrying improvised tools, scavenged from a range of industries.  He noticed that nobody was smiling; unusual for people who had grown up accustomed to hardship and making the best of a harsh existence.  Things must have been pretty bad.
    The copper mine was a legacy of the colonial era but had been abandoned for most of the last century.  With the rising price of copper, due to China’s economic boom and the need for copper wiring in every electronic device, from iPads to power lines, the mine had reopened.  Reopened was a loose term.  The mine needed heavy investment and there was talk of a Chinese takeover.  The Chinese were crawling all over Africa, they didn’t call it colonialism, they called it ‘development’. But development was a loose term too; the development they meant was China’s development and one day Africa would wake up and realize that all new roads lead to China.  No doubt the Chinese were creating jobs, but there was a feeling amongst western aid workers that there was some kind of unspoken long-term agenda that would one day become apparent.  The Chinese kept apart from the rest of the development community, spoke their own language and ate in their own restaurants.  They had a reputation amongst the locals of being harsh managers, bad tenants and veracious johns.  There was a joke among the Ethiopian working girls that a Chinese labourer would pay for a girl, finish, go to the bathroom and swap T-shirts with one of his ten friends hiding inside.  Ten trips to the bathroom later the girl starts getting suspicious about her client’s atomic stamina.  It was perhaps unfair to compare Chinese road workers to the diplomats, PhD researchers and development workers who comprised the rest of the expat community.  Tim was pretty sure if it had been English road workers on a jolly working holiday abroad they would’ve been worse, hell some of the aid workers were worse.  He’d lost count of the number of alcoholic, middle-aged, divorced aid workers who’d ‘fallen in love’ with a local working-girl and just poured another drink or run off to some other warzone every time they thought they were lying to themselves. 
    But if Britain’s days of plundering the world as a nation were over, China’s were just beginning, and after three-thousand years of continuous Chinese civilization you could see why they were a little anxious to get moving. 
    The Chinese takeover of the mine was why Tim was here.  He specialized in value chain analysis and corporate social responsibility and had been tasked by the Institute with advising the Ethiopian government and the local community on how to handle the deal.  For the locals it meant getting them a fair share;