John Butts@JBMedia - Reports:
TIÉBÉLÉ, Burkina Faso -- On the rocky ground outside the Kollo mining village near the border between Burkina Faso and Ghana, about 100 people are working, 30 or so of them children. They smash boulders into pebbles and pebbles into grit with primitive hammers and sticks. They haul buckets of well water up the hillside and, pouring this water into shallow pans filled with rock and dirt, they swirl the muddy mix, looking in the silt for tiny flecks of gold.
Nearby, a small hill rises from this barren gold field, and atop this hill are hand-dug shafts that plunge 150 feet into the ground. Joseph, 15, and Germain, 12, lead the way down into the mine, gripping knotted ropes, finding footholds and squeezing past support timbers in the yard-wide pits. They get to the bottom after 20 minutes and silently begin to fill buckets of ore to be hauled up by rope.
The shaft ends in a cramped, pitch-dark pit. The bottom widens a bit to reveal a tiny, wedge-shaped crevice. In the darkness, sitting cross-legged with a flashlight strapped to his head, is a small boy. He chinks at the rock walls with a handmade pickax and scoops the shards into a large green bucket. His hands never stop moving - scooping and chipping, chipping and scooping. The older boys call him Théophile. They say he is 7 years old. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/11/one-million-children-labor-in-africas-goldmines/
salt likit
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