Children under the Shadow of Shining Gold

Finding a nugget. (Makoto Kawamura PHOTO)

thiopia is an African country that earns more than US$7.8 million from its large resources of gold, according to the country's Ministry of Mines and Energy (as of December 2006).

Note: The Human Development Index (HDI) is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education, and standard of living for countries worldwide.

The index was developed in 1990 by Indian Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen and Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, with help from Gustav Ranis of Yale University and Lord Meghnad Desai of the London School of Economics, and has been used ever since by the United Nations Development Programme in its annual Human Development Report.

Midroc Gold is the only company involved in industrialized primary gold exploitation, having been awarded a 20-year concession from the government for the Lege Dembi Gold Mine in March 1998.

This mine, located near Shakiso town 250 km south of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, is believed to contain 200tns of gold reserves.

Small-scale gold miners from villages around the town, mostly poor farmers, dig for the gold, dreaming of someday getting rich. Wacudima, a two-hour drive from the center of the town, is one of these villages.

A hall for hope (Makoto Kawamura PHOTO)

There are many holes scattered over the outskirts of the village. Each hole is 20-50m in depth, where the vein of gold usually lies.

This is mostly in the form of gold dust, however one out of, say, every ten thousand miners may find a nugget, which is both the lure for these miners and the impetus that makes it difficult for them to give up the challenge.

However, none of the gold miners are allowed to dig on a first-come first-serve basis. Most of the area is government property, and the miners need authorization from the local petit bourgeoisie, which lease part of the land from a government officer dispatched from the central office, called license holders, to mine gold.

The authorization for a license holder requires an approval fee of 60 Ethiopian Birr (ETB) per 5,000 square meters annually, as well as 200ETB for a location map on local gold veins and 40ETB for legal fees.

In addition to this 300ETB, the license holders hire laborers to dig holes. It takes three or four laborers a full day to dig a 10-meter hole, so the property ownere prepare another 300 ETB to pay for a single hole at proper depth (20 to 50m) for small-scale gold mining.

They also need to buy some water for gold miners to wash out gold from dirt after they return above the ground. It costs 1ETB for 20 liters.

Note: 1 US dollar=9.221 ETB, as of May 1, 2007; The average wage for an unskilled worker is US$1 per day, and the average salary for a new college graduate is US$90.

After the administrative and engineering work is taken care of, the gold miners, some of whom are children of poor farmers, get to work. Size does matter in a hole. Once the miners descend into the hole to the farthest depth, they need to dig a shallow hole horizontally and crawl forward on the tunnel for gold, using a lit candle.

Although Ethiopia has ratified ILO Convention No. 138 (1973) regarding the minimum age for employment and No. 182 (1999) regarding the worst forms of child labor, no one in the village area pays attention to these conventions. In fact, most of the villagers have never heard of these agreements, not to mention the name of the organization.

Going down more than 20m, the candle flame will sometimes flicker out, and it is then that the children know they have reached a depth where the oxygen is too thin, thus warning them they have a limited amount of time left.

Air is constantly provided by a small pump made from sheep skin or sheep stomach through a tube whose one end is connected to the pump and the other hung down into the hole. It helps circulate stuffy air in the hole.

Abeti (left), a gold miner with his mother (Makoto Kawamura PHOTO)

One of these children is Abeti, age nine, who works to support his alcoholic mother. He has no father and no chance to go to school. His family has settled near the area. The roof of their house is half torn off and they sleep on a mattress, their only possession, dreaming of a future with gold.

"I want to get gold as soon as possible," he says. "And I will sell it to get some money and build a house and make our family life better with a small farm."

The reality is that he may extract 0.5g of gold dust a week, which is worth 40 ETB. His mother cannot help him; she can only lament her own life, saying, "My life should not have been like this."

Abeti's gold dust is bought by the license holder who leases the land where his hole is located. The license holder then sells the gold to the local government officer.

The officer then delivers the gold to the National Bank of Ethiopia , the only bank in the country authorized to buy and export gold.

In 2005, the largest buyer of Ethiopia's gold was Switzerland, followed by United Arab Emirates and South Africa, according to data from the country's Ministry of Trade and Industry.

The irony is that many gold miners in Wacudima village, including Abeti, still don't understand why foreigners are crazy about gold.