She fights for a future amid the filth

With her painted face that matches a grubby mustard-coloured ANC shirt, Philiswa Vamanda stands in a mountain of filth, her dream of becoming a nurse now a distant memory.

The 22-year-old may be petite but she is no pushover where she works as a waste picker at the often treacherous Msunduzi Landfill in Pietermaritzburg, where sorting through the mountain of discarded waste can have deadly consequences.

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