In a world away from the glamour of Sunday’s World Cup final workers plough on, some still waiting to be paid
Isaac* and Emmanuel* would have watched the World Cup final if they could have, but work came first. While Lionel Messi was rewriting history they moved through one of Qatar’s opulent shopping malls, area by area, fulfilling the cleaning tasks their employer had assigned.
It was not too hard to glean what was going on, and sometimes Isaac would try to make his old Nokia phone strain for updates. But football, and especially football as inaccessible as this, was really a remote concern. Walking past designer handbags, perfumes and suits every day feels like a trudge through vacant, empty space. The young Ghanaian men are in their third month here and are yet to be paid a penny.
