The miners rewarded him with 10 percent of the haul each month — worth a few hundred dollars, he said.
“We would save it and save it until there was enough to buy things for the community,” Waru said. It paid for a new boat motor, a generator and a radio.
But then the bouts of diarrhoea among children began. Erosion from the mines turned the river a sandy brown. Fish that had long been a staple of the community’s diet now had high levels of mercury, which is used to extract gold.
No comments:
Post a Comment