Many kids here are pulled out of school after their seventh birthday to spend their childhood in the dark, in the mines.
With little more than a bucket and a frighteningly thin piece of rope, they’re lowered into the suffocating tunnels and told to chisel away at the cracked earth. They are hoping to find gold. Not huge clusters like you’d envision from a romanticized gold rush era. They’re looking for any infinitesimal flecks, often as small as pencil shavings.
Once they’ve hacked away buckets of earth, it’s sifted, heated and combined with dangerous, hot mercury in a makeshift extraction process to ready the gold for sale.
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