Photo by: Marie-Anne Muller

With an amazing gesture and a wide fishing experience from their ancestors, the three fishermen are extracting little fish with their nets in the port of Tyr. Fishing is not that bad on a Friday in March! However, the number of clients is decreasing. The owner of the boat, with his short hair and a crab tattoo on his hand, used to sell 60 to 70 kilos per day and per client (essentially to restaurant distributors) before the Israeli attack in summer 2006.

Nevertheless, since then, the fishing portion has decreased: hardly 2 daily kg per client, even though the price of fish remained the same. This man refused to reveal his identity, so we called him Ali. Well, Ali divides his salary into 5 parts. Each part is given to one of the three fishermen; And two parts are dedicated to him, to the boat, and to the net he puts at their disposal. The salary has also decreased: from 700,000/800,000 L.L to 100,000L.L per day for the whole boat, which means hardly 20,000L.L per day for each angler, says Ali.

According to the president of the fishermen syndicate in Tyr, Khalil Taha, a good fisherman earns nowadays around 250 $ per month. “My dad was a fisherman. Thanks to this job, he sent his ten children to school”, says Khalil, looking back nostalgically to this period. “As for me, if I had a kid, I would not teach him to swim, for fishing is a job of starvation and sadness”, he bitterly says. He is not able anymore to gain life from this profession he has been in since 25 years. He counts especially on the help of his brothers in the Ivory Coast. However, when he talks about his job, he speaks with emotional words and sparkling eyes: “the sea purifies us. When the catch is good, I feel like I am the ruler of the world”.