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What are small scale miners?
Small scale miners or gold miners are the small gold miners these are people like me who live in a high mountains and the main livelihood is gold mining.
Yes gold. most people who know nothing or have not experienced mining life say we are rich and say we we are above them because we actually work in the gold mining area.
But they don't know how poor and how little you earn.
The small miners are just hoping for luck every time we enter at the dangerous and deep tunnels were risking our life, gamble not sure if when we go out we have available gold or if there is enough for a day of our living.
In the hardships of our lives and in our quest to get enough gold to support our family, we cant even remember the date and the day because we are soaked in the mine every day because this is our only livelihood.
But I am a liar if i say that there is no one became rich from small miners, of course many are also blessed with lucku enough. but in our side we have remained poor and are still mining.
As the year went on, we hardly got enough gold for our daily lives here. almost my entire life I was here in this class of our livelihood.
Yes there are days when we are lucky we earn a lot but if you have experienced living in the mountains you know that the price of goods is almost triple compared to the low -lying areas.
And we have to buy that than going to the lowlying areas, It's just as cheap as 300php in our currency thats around $6 in a dollar currency but in Philippines that a lot of money you have to spend that amount so that you can get to the nearest city, so it's hard for us to go down town, especially since the road is difficult and only motorcycles can reach us.
Because almost everything we need on a daily basis is expensive, our income of 500 per day is also useless, they triple the price of goods and we understand that because of the difficulty of transportations here with us and everyone from the cities that are brought up to here so its understandable.
Let's go back to a miner's job it's a gamble for us and we risk our lives at an uncertain amount sometimes you come out with nothing.
At any time inside the tunnel there's a tendency of collapsing and bury us alive
So the motto of us small miners. when we are inside. We are "buried alive"
Because we don't really know if we'll be able to get out every time we enter about five rolls or more than that. how far the hoses we follow as guind before we reach at the bottom that give us air inside the tunnel. And it take about an hour before you reach the very bottom of the tunnel aren't that easy.
I have a lot of neighbors got buried alive others get trap for how many days before got rescued. Of course that's scares us but we don't have choice if don't work we have nothing to eat and have no more goals for the future.
Then others will say that our life is better. Yes, we eat three times a day, but at any time in exchange for our lives.
If only it were that easy to get gold as they think we would be ended all be rich. Because those other relatives of us who are in the city, once we are lucky and got enough to go down at the nearest city, we go down and visit them when you give them a little money, they will tell you that you are stingy and stingy.
Maybe some people think that mining gold is just easy money. Haha for every penny we earn, we invest our lives there.
Lesson: Don't just tell people that they are stingy or whatever, they are not stingy, we just don't know how they started to rise in life as we live to invest in every piece of rice we eat. But no matter what our work is, as long as it is honorable, we can be proud of everyone.
Thanks for reading, I hope I have many more stories, but it's too long, so I'll just do part two of this article. Thank you.
