Movin' Right Along: Gold Mining

Hiawa is in the Western Region and right in the thick of Gold Country. Although the omnipresence of Gold mining is conspicuous (new SUVs often zipping through the town filled with foreigner prospectors), I had never had the opportunity to visit an actual gold mining site. The men who work the mines are called Galamse boys and are known for being very strong, a little rowdy, and always throwing their money around. Galamse work pays very well sometimes up to 70 Ghana cedis a day (roughly $50) and in the Western and Ashanti regions Galamse work is easy to find. This all poses an interesting problem for promoting the value of education in these communities. Considering most Ghanaian teachers make roughly 8 Ghana cedis a day and even well paid professionals less than 30 Ghc, how is it that you can justify coming to school and working hard to better your mind when with your body alone you can accumulate quite a lot of wealth. In fact, Alex has two students the Aguri brothers, who live less than a 10 minute walk from several mining sites but a 2 hour walk from their JHS. How can you possibly explain the value of walking two hours to school when simply working across the street could make you a very rich man by the age of 30. It is a problem indeed.

My mining site experience went a little something like this: One afternoon after a long day of painting Paa Yaw met us in his taxi and asked us if we’d care to see how palm wine was made (more on this later). This offer usually includes a delightful walk through the woods and frankly a glass of Palm wine was just what this girl needed after a long day of World Painting. We drove a several minutes out of town, down a dirt road, and were informed that we would be making one stop at the mining site before continuing on to our Palm Wine destination.

I honestly don’t know what to say about this particular experience other than my jaw dropped to the ground as I stepped over the ridge to see a large pit full of workers mining gold by hand. This is no 49’s gold rush operation but more of a man-as-machine situation. The sound of the pit alone was astounding with its rhythmic clanging and banging. It was an assembly line of sorts- one man would place a shovel load of earth into a tin pan which would be tossed to another man, again to another man, and then handed to another who would dump the dirt through a hand-cranked sieve. The work seemed never ending-- tin bowls being tossed every this way and that but all in perfect rhythmic efficiency. It was truly a site to behold. The pictures definitely do not do it justice and I am unable to post the video I took.