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Published: September 29th 2008
I go to a travel agent to buy a plane ticket and there I meet a very helpful person, Sugiato Sumas. He's from Banjarmasin but lives in Jakarta, working for the government. He helps to arrange my ticket, although he's just a client and doesn't work for the travel agency, then drives me to the bus station and offers to help with my ticket there. I thank him but don't want to detain him any longer.
His behaviour stands in such contrast to that of the touts and other vultures that hang around bus and train stations in Asia. It is the generosity that is so basic to Islam: I'm a guest and must be accorded every privilege and endless amounts of help. The belief here is that you should treat all guests as if they've been sent by Allah because Allah may really have sent this person to test you, to see if you behave as you ought to according to Islam's tenets.
I catch a minibus to Martapura, a half-hour drive, then a local bemo to Cempaka. It drops me off on the highway and the driver points to a dirt road. I start walking under looming
clouds that slope down the sky like grey mountains. It's only a kilometre or so and half-way a young guy on a small motorbike picks e up. Just as we arrive it begins to rain hard and we shelter under a blue tarp strung on sticks. His name is Roni and he tells me he's a businessman, although he looks like he can hardly be 16 or 17 years old. He sells diamonds and polished agates.
The fields, or the parts that I can see, are several square kilometres and employ some 30 000 people. Not all of them are diggers as many others do related work such as driving dump trucks or cutting and polishing in small workshops what emerges from the ground.
The fields are dotted with holes full of muddy water, some of them a couple of metres square worked by a single person, others much more extensively dug out and worked by small teams. There are bamboo structures at the bigger pits, a kind of staircase where the men deposit bucketfuls of stones that are then washed to separate smaller from bigger, diamonds from dross. Roni tells me that two days earlier there had
Flumes
By pouring water from higher to lower, these separate smaller gravel from bigger rocks.been a collapse at one of the big digs and three men were killed.
In the smaller holes men are sitting or standing, swishing big, black, wok-shaped pans that come down to a point in the middle. This is placer mining and they're extracting what looks like fine black sand but Roni's English isn't good enough to explain what it is and what it's used for. Black gold? He leads me around from hole to hole. Some of the miners - all men - let me photograph them. Others refuse.
Yellow dump trucks come and load stone that's been dug out and washed - men shovelling them full, shining with sweat in the sun - then leave. Where does the stone go? For sorting, for disposal, for use in construction?
This is hard work and the rewards can't be great but it seems the average find is 10 diamonds per day. Roni is a seller, not a digger and he shows me his polished agates and his diamonds, tiny transparent white or yellow chips. Another guy shows me a much bigger diamond, cut and polished but full of instrusions, flaws. A third tries to sell me his
goodes but I'm not buying.
I drink tea at a make-shift stall run by a woman whose age I cannot guess. Somewhere between 40 and 60 I suppose. When I ask the price she hesitates and I quickly say Real price, not tourist price. A man beside me guffaws and she says 1 000 rupiah. She lets me take her picture but doesn't say much.
After a couple of hours Roni drives me back to the highway. I can see he's disappointed I'm not buying stones from him so I pay him what I can for guide services but it's not much.
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