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 acquainted with Mustafa Hamed, a 24-year-old ex-bus driver who fell unexpectedly into a life as a broker in 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 fate for the man he wanted to be. 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. … 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.'”

‘Transplant tourism’

Nearly half of Egyptians live in poverty. Although the nation’s economy is privatizing and 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, and others have bartered kidneys and livers to pay debts.

Similar tales echo around the globe. Human organs are brokered from Pakistan to China; kidney theft rings have swept through villages in India. Poor people 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.

The business has thrived for years in Egypt. The country has no laws and little oversight regarding most transplants.

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

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

Struggles of donors

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 the village had made a fortune in the city, or so went the stories that trickled from the Nile.

Abdullah and his brother trusted a man who vanished with their money and, suddenly, the brothers were 75,000 pounds, or about $13,600, in debt.

“I have two choices: pay my debts or go to jail,” Abdullah said.

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

Abdullah said back home he and his brother never earned enough to be rich; they made just enough to imagine they could be. But, 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 school teacher 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 new people. I want people who don’t know anything about me.”