The silver mines of Potosi

Potosi is a lovely town in Bolivia which sits at the base of a hill containing huge silver reserves. This silver has been mined for hundreds of years and has meant the town has many pretty churches and plazas built by it's wealthy, and lucky, residents.

To better understand what these miners go through to extract the silver from the hill we went out to mines. After putting on our protective clothing we dropped in at a market to buy the miners presents of dynamite, soft drinks and bags of coca leaves. Then we made our way up the hill to the mine entrance.

At the start of the mine the roof was high enough to walk standing up but it wasn't long before we were crouching down to avoid banging our heads on the rock above. As we followed the railed tracks used to transport the rock out of the mine a couple of young lads came by pushing an empty trolly. We gave them bottles of soft drinks, which they were very happy to receive, and they explained how they were working in the mine with their fathers during the school holidays. They were only fourteen and it was illegal from them to be working there but as our guide explained, who was going the check?

We headed deeper into the mine and the air of hotter and became thick with dust. I wear a ... around my face to help keep the dust out but it made breathing hard. Soon we were crawling on hands and knees through very narrow passages and I had to take off the ... because I could not breath. Better to breath air containing asbestos and silica dust than to not breath at all.

At points we were crawling on our bellies and would then come to areas that opened up into small chambers where miners were working. One farther and son team gladly took the dynamite offered by us. The son was making a hole in the rock into which the dynamite would later be placed, although it would take him three hours to chisel the hole using the hammer and steel spike he had.

Making our way up old wooden ladders we came a young man shovelling rocks from a dumping point to a collection point. He spent ten hours a day shovelling rocks underground. Like all the miners he chewed coca leaves constantly so we gave him a bag of coca leaves and whist he rested we shovelled his rocks for him.

After a couple of grueling hours underground we returned to the surface where we could breath at last and to use up the last of our dynamite we made homemade bombs.

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