Egypt's organ donors: Looking within for wealth

Hamed's 4-year-old son, Mohamed, was dying of cancer and needed an artery transplant that cost $5,000. The only savings Hamed had was what he fished from his pockets at the end of the day.

There was another way, one whispered about for those with nothing. A man could wager part of himself, slip into a hospital gown, and wake up with an incision above the gut.

Hamed sold a section of his liver for a bit more than the price of his son's operation. The boy died in surgery.

With his scar healing and his son buried, Hamed, whose knowledge of anatomy would perhaps fill a single page, decided that driving a bus was not the fate of the man he wanted to be. He brokered his first liver deal four months ago. He earned $900. Four more sales have followed.

"Things shouldn't be this way, but they are," he says. "I sold part of my liver to save my son. I had to do it. . . . You cut your body and sell your pieces. But some people who come to me aren't that desperate. They could find other solutions. Many men I see now want to sell their organs so they can afford to buy an apartment to get married. That doesn't seem desperate enough to me. I try to tell them: 'Be patient. You don't need to do this.' "

Patience and desperation move in curious currents in Cairo. Nearly half of Egyptians live in poverty, and although the nation's economy is privatizing and growing, inflation is crushing the poor and working class. The price of green peppers has risen 90% in the last year.

Thousands have moved to the richer Persian Gulf; many have put off marriage, a delay that in Egypt is the stinging sign of a man's failure. Others, such as Hamed, have bartered kidneys and livers to pay off debts and reinvent dreams.

Similar tales echo around the globe. Human organs are brokered from Pakistan to China; kidney-theft rings have swept through villages in India. The poor in underdeveloped nations, such as Moldova and the Philippines, are offered "transplant tourism" packages that arrange for them to travel to another country and sell their organs to rich patients. It is a market of desperation and ingenuity in which doctors ask few questions and donors often end up ill, and sometimes dead.