The next time you think about buying gold as an investment or a gift, consider this frightening statistic: As many as 1 million children ages 5 to 17 work in Africa's small gold mines, earning as little as $2 a day.
The nauseating information comes from a heart-wrenching story in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer. It describes a scene in Burkina Faso, one of the world's poorest countries, where 30 children do this very dirty and dangerous job. It's also a problem in countries such as Ghana, Mali and Niger, among others.
"They smash boulders into pebbles and pebbles into grit with primitive hammers and sticks," the paper says. "They haul buckets of well water up the hillside and, pouring this water into shallow pans filled with rock and dirt, they swirl the muddy mix, looking in the silt for tiny flecks of gold."
http://money.msn.com/now/post.aspx?post=b276a84b-6a7a-45c3-91b0-722f64213805
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