Rosemary is a small-scale gold miner living
and working in the depths of rural eastern Uganda.
She doesn’t actually do the mining – that’s
the work of the men. But her task, along with that of several other women in
the village, is to spend hours at a time sluicing and panning the powdered ore,
to find what gold they can.
It’s back-breaking work, and the returns
are such that the women have to pan from morning to night to try and earn
enough to make ends meet. As a result they barely get time to see their
children, or cook food, or do any of the other chores that go with living a
subsistence lifestyle without any of the mod-cons we take for granted.
Life is harsh indeed, and the older
children often end up having to take on the role of surrogate mother to the
younger ones, whilst the parents work at the mines.
But, life is taking a turn for the better,
thanks to the installation of Kacha and its associated Mastas: a ‘wonder
machine’ as one of the miners described it to me. I have had the joy of
spending a couple of days with the miners in Busia district, and hearing for
myself the impact of the Gold Kacha, which was installed in the area in April
this year, thanks to some funding obtained through CRED Foundation from a donor
fund in Guernsey.
As Rosemary said: ‘until now life was just
about finding food to eat, covering education, and getting from day to day.
Now, with the Kacha, I am looking forward to being able to have a little more
than that. I am looking forward to being able to look after my family
properly’.
This ‘wonder machine’ that Rosemary is so
excited to be starting to use, uses centrifugal force to extract gold in much
greater quantities than was being extracted by panning and sluicing. Whereas
before the miners got 65% of the gold at best, they are now recovering 96% -
that’s a significant improvement to say the least, and equates to a lot more
income for the family. It also extracts the gold much faster, meaning that the
amount of ore that used to take a day to pan, now takes an hour, giving the
women more time to spend doing other things.
Betty, one of the other women that I met
reinforced all this when I chatted with her about the Kacha:
‘The benefits to the women are many. For
example it is easier for us as there is now less heavy lifting as we don’t have
to stand at the top of a Z and load the ore onto the mat. Also we don’t have to
spend a long time panning. Before we might be panning for a whole day, now that
has gone.
We get more time with our children – we can
be there for them more. And we have time to go and do the garden in the morning
before going to the mines, so we have more healthy foods.
We get time to do the cooking as well.
Sometimes before we would be so tired we would just go to the café to get some
food in the evenings. Now we have time to cook for ourselves and give the
children a good meal.
We feel that our parent role is better
fulfilled now, and we feel happier with ourselves as parents.
And for the pregnant women it is much
better as it is easier on the back’.
What more do I need to say! The Kacha, with
its associated Mastas (two sluice boards that make up part of the process), is
changing lives for the better. Our aim is to get funding for even more of these
pieces of equipment, so that they can be installed in more small-scale gold
mining communities and help spread the benefit even further.
NB: There is one other bit of equipment
that needs to be gained to complete the
suite of mercury-free gold processing, and help pave the way to fairtrade gold
status – the Konka – but I’ll tell you about that another day. For now let’s
just rejoice in the Kacha-inspired improvement in the lives of Rosemary, Betty,
and so many others.
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