CAIRO, EGYPT - He sits quietly at the corner cafe, a gold watch on his wrist. If you need a liver or want to sell a piece of yours, grab a chair and get to know Mustafa Hamed, a 24-year-old former bus driver who fell unexpectedly into brokering human organs.

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

"Things shouldn't be this way, but they are," he said. "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.' "

Poverty drives trade

Nearly half of Egyptians live in poverty and, although the nation's economy is growing, inflation is crushing the poor and working classes. The price of green peppers has risen 90 percent over the past year.

Thousands have moved to the richer Persian Gulf; many have put off marriage, which in Egypt is the stinging sign of a man's failure. Others -- like Hamed -- have bartered kidneys and livers to pay debts and re-invent dreams.

Similar tales echo around the globe. Human organs are brokered from Pakistan to China. Kidney theft rings have swept through villages in India. In underdeveloped nations, such as Moldova and the Philippines, poor people are offered "transplant tourism" packages 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.

The business has thrived for years in Egypt. The country has no laws regarding most transplants. Statistics are unreliable. Medical groups estimate that as many as 500 licensed kidney transplants are performed each year, but a legislator investigating the practice indicated that the actual number is much higher.

Few choices for donors

Donors and patients in Cairo know where to go. There are cafes near clinics and labs where the brokers sit, cell phones buzzing.

Those needing organs are easy to spot. They carry X-rays and blood work charts. They come from Upper Egypt and the Nile Delta, their purses and wallets bulky with borrowed money.

The donors face their own hardships. Ayman Abdullah was an accountant in Upper Egypt when he and his brother decided to take their parents' savings and move to Cairo to open a mobile phone shop. Others who had left Abdullah's village had made a fortune in the city, or so went the stories.

Abdullah and his brother trusted a man who vanished with their money and, suddenly, the brothers were $13,600 in debt.

"I have two choices: pay my debts or go to jail," said Abdullah. He hoped to negotiate part of his liver for about $7,000.

His brother found a buyer whose blood type and tissue type match his; he expects to undergo the surgery in two weeks.

Abdullah said that back home he and his brother never earned enough to be rich; they made just enough to imagine they could be. Now, he just wants to creep away from being made a fool.

"If God allows me to live after the operation, I won't stay in this country. I want to go work as a schoolteacher or salesman or do any kind of job in any Gulf country," Abdullah said. "After one undergoes this operation, he feels inferior to the rest of his people. I want to go somewhere with ... people who don't know anything about me."

Next page >