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Published: March 15th 2005
the masses
working to get a little goldAs the day starts at 4am, the group of four men prepare to repalce their counterparts in the segment of the mine which belongs to the cooperative of two families.
A total of about twelve men and boys and an equal number of women and girls, ranging from the age of eight to sixty. I suppose the reason why it stops at sixty is the nature of the work.
Before the four men climb into the hole they work with their hands, steel rods and sticks of dynamite, they prepare for the day by smoking a cigarette, loading their cheek with coca leaves (increases strength, reduces hunger, and prolongs the amount of time they can withstand the brutal punishment), and they have a shot of rum.
The men work for sixteen hours, and the scene is repeated time and time again, day in and day out. If they were to leave the mine, it would be occupied by some other ´cooperative´ -
The end product of a day is a truckload of raw material which is transported ten miles down the road in bags of 50kg by truck, unloaded into a nondescript facade housing the remainder of
Again and again...
working to extract gold - brought together by mercury the members of the family units working in cooperation to try to abate hunger and desolation. This is where I come into the scene.
There were about ten children under the age of knowledge, busy rocking back and forth on primitive devices created to take the material blasted from the mines after it had been seperated by several manual processes which proceeded. The kids, would rock back and forth on a type of teeter-totter which had as a fulcrum, a huge boulder, which in turn rested in a small pond of mud, rocks, water and at best a few grains of gold.
Surrounding the continued rocking of the children, were a series of men and women which would add water, or take water out of the pond of mud in order to determine if there were any gold within the sediments.
Once the raw material from the mines had been crushed by the army of children, to reveal any and all potential grains of gold, the brute strength process of man and primitive machine slows in order to allow a man to syphon the surface water out of the bottom of the small pond in which the
the beauty of childhood
somethings are impossible to steal grinding was taking place. Once the massive teeter-totter rock is secured, the man pours mercury into the sediment in order to cause the grains of gold to congeal into a caustic glob of poison and gold.
Through another lengthy series of steps, the week of work of this group of between twenty and thirty is distilled into two small balls of perhaps six to eight grams of gold which has the color of mercury, not gold. From here it goes to the fire to burn the mercury away and provide roughly $200 soles nuevos per family for one week of physicall demanding and extreemly toxic work - let´s say USD$75 -
All I could do was take pictures of the children and let them see themselves in the 2x2¨ screen on my digital Leica. For a short ninety minutes, they played like children, laughed like children made faces, smiled, and enjoyed themselves like children. Their smiles were the only thing which kept my tears at bay until I left, and was out of sight - my daughter is sixteen, a little boy i adore is seven, kids in my family are all their age - and I thank
the grind
ALL DAY LONG CRUNCHING ROCK God they have the life they have - God has given me more than I deserve or could ever ask for.
I leave for a two day expedition into the Andes withe the game warden at the Galeras Vicuña reserve at 5am in the morning and God willing will be back Thursday night. The Vicuñas are giving birth this time of the year, and I want to capture that point in time and whatever else God has in store for me...
Until then - peace and love from Nasca
the website is just about live www.juanfranco.com/nasca.htm
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