Golddiggers

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost

On Friday I finished my cervical cancer formation in Kita. A photojournalist friend of mine, on assignment from the NYTimes was heading to a gold mining town on the Senegalese border. I decided to tag along with him and our other friend, feeling the need for some adventure, and probably feeling a bit bored with Africa. Well, I definitely got a wakeup call.

So off we went. First we jumped into a rickety old van (bush taxi), and flew as the rain licked our backs to a nearby village where we heard we could get transport the next morning. There we had a hilarious time trying to find out the schedule of the trucks going; each person we asked gave us a different answer with a satisfied grin of self assurance, until after the 30th person we were ready to smash our Nalgenes (damn these reinforced plastics). There was no other option except waiting by the side of the road, and we found a nice spot under the tree and hung out with little children crawling all over us, until we finally flagged down a pickup truck going at 5pm. In we squeezed ourselves into the truck bed, along with 10 other Malians searching for gold.

We rode, all wrapped around each other and literally hanging on for dear life, driving straight through a river and winding through paths in the forest through the dark. We finally reached it the next morning, covered in dust; we could barely distinguish between the Africans and us, all the same color for the moment. We rode down a roller coaster of valleys and streams and saw the buzzing mine below us, thousands of glittering bodies like black coal digging in the hand dug mining holes supported by logs; their headlamps flickered, glowing eyes looking out from the abyss. We drove up again into the hill of the village we were staying in, and here more young men stood in clouds of dust from crushed rocks, while others poured the rock dust through a little water conduit to try to wash out the gold. Finally the gold dust would appear, a few almost invisible shiny flecks in the water that they put in a tiny little metal dish to extract, evaporating all the excess water. If they were lucky enough to gather a gram of gold they sold it on the street corner, opening little paper packets of gold leaf and nuggets that they slid to each other like a drug - not that there is much of a difference, really.

Of course many of the men we talked to told us they had been here for months, a year, and found nothing. Mostly it was sad, a slew of young West Africans in this world of putrid toilet water, sink holes and Obama paraphernalia. Since they found gold five years ago, the tiny village of a few hundred people boomed to a few thousand, with most of the young men who migrated there living in makeshift shacks or thrown together crowded mud huts. You felt a sense they missed the mark – excited by the idea that they could find more than their quiet villages could offer, they ended up here, wasting the money they weren’t earning on street food and prostitutes, family-less but wearing cool American jeans. There was one pump for the thousands of men who lived there, and the streets were spotted with hand dug wells every few feet. The doctors we interviewed told us of the daily deaths due to water borne diseases, exacerbated by a measles outbreak, pandemic STIs and almost no medicine or equipment.

One night we went out for a drink with a Malian we had met while eating our macaroni and goat meat dinner. A tall gorgeous Nigerian woman, about 19, sat down next to us. “I remember you!” she said to me in perfect English, smacking her lined lips. “I saw your hair; I almost went crazy it was so long!” She said the Malian name she donned was Kati, but in the bar she was known as Goodness. She told us how she hated it here; she had been here for about a month, and missed her home in Nigeria. “Maybe I’ll be able to leave in a few months, I don’t know,” she said, disturbed. We asked her about what she was doing here. She told us that a large woman had come to her village, promising to take her to Spain to work in a restaurant. She had went, was put in the back of a truck, and ended up here – a remote mining town. There was no more big woman, only a “boss” that told her she needed to pay him a million CFA (about $2,000) if she wanted to go to Europe. There was only one way to pay that off here, of course. “It was something I had never wanted to do.” Forced into prostitution. Trafficked. I sat with the blood leaving my face, tears in my eyes, as she got up in the middle of a sentence and ran out. My friend went to talk to her, and she told him how she felt stranded. Trapped. No Bambara, no French, no money, no family who knew where she was, no way of leaving. Later, we found out that there were hundreds of them here, all with the same story; none of them have left. Hundreds had died since this ring was started a few years ago. I suddenly loathed every man I saw, the men that forced her here, the dirty men touching their mini skirts with guilty grins, even the one who had taken us here. Because they are all apart of this. And now so are we. This is something we all know about, it happens, it is terrible but it’s always someone else. But to look her in the face was another story.

The next day I went back to Kenieba, a town where a few volunteers lived. I got on the truck, away from the dust covered miners, and they are so lost, the women are so lost, and I needed to be somewhere I knew.