Gold mine in Nambija

Padre Jorge was kind enough to take us on another fun outing -- this time to a working gold mine in the town of Nambija, about 90 minutes away.  The two main industries in our province seem to be agriculture and gold mining.  I had always assumed that the mining was a government enterprise, but it turns out there are just lots of small individual mines up in the mountains, with widely varying safety standards.

As we were entering the town of Nambija, there were these hoses everywhere.

It turns out that every individual mine needs its own constant water supply, and they have rigged up all these hoses that branch off to the different mines.  I guess underground plumbing is too complicated and expensive...

One of Padre Jorge's fellow priests in the area, Padre René, knew of a particularly safe and well-run mine.  He called they guy in charge of it, who agreed to show us around.

The home of the family who runs the mine -- on the premises 

The entrance to the machinery part of the mine, where they mill the rocks and extract the gold.  The above yellow house is toward the right.

This nice man named Clever owns the mine, and has been working in mining since he was a very young man.   He pays attention to safety, and reportedly runs the safest mine around.  He led us up to the entrance of the mining tunnel. above the buildings.

This is the entrance to the tunnel, which leads deep into the mountain.   It is big enough to drive a small vehicle through, and tall enough that we tall gringos could walk pretty much upright.

It is quite dark in the tunnel, but there is safety lighting.  There are really no visible seams or chunks of gold -- evidently there used to be, but much of that has been dug out.

As a point of comparison, Clever said that this is the typical size of a mining tunnel in the area.  It is barely big enough to crouch in.   Over the months I have seen a number of miners in the clinic, many of them with back pain -- and one can understand why.  It is tough work -- but people do it because it provides a regular paycheck, which can be hard to come by.

After the rocks are dug out, they are pushed down the hill to the buildings below, where they are ground into very fine sand, and small amounts of gold are extracted from the ore using a somewhat complicated system that I don't really understand. 

 It is very hard work for not a tremendous monetary reward.  But these folks are ever hopeful that there is much more gold in these mountains than meets the eye.  It was a super interesting place to see.