Limbs, lives risked for gold nuggets

While many of their peers are winding down a day in school, five school-aged children in Barangay Ambolong of Aroroy town, 32 kilometers from Masbate City, have been panning for gold for hours, not even sure if they can extract the precious mineral from the rocks they have carried from a hill at least a kilometer away.

The gold rush in Aroroy attracts children and even adults, who had tried their luck in other places, thinking they had left their hometown for good, but opted to return home instead.

Noli Durano, 51, is among those who left Aroroy to look for a job in Metro Manila but was unsuccessful.

Three months ago, he returned and sold most of his remaining land for about P150,000 to buy two ball mills that cost P26,000 each.

A ball mill is a drum-like machine that grinds rock into a fine powder until it becomes a slimy, viscous mixture. It is hollow and filled with heavy rods inside and pulverizes rocks by being rotated by an engine, which causes the rods inside to move and pound the rocks in the process.

Durano used the remaining sum for constructing the hut that houses the machine and the pond where panning for gold is done for hours. The hut is just under a canopy of coconuts, which sprawl along the rolling hills of the municipality.

Child labor

While Ambolong is just about a kilometer away from the town center/business area of Aroroy, it seems a world apart:  teeming with gold panners.

Village folk, including children, flock to the ball mills like that owned by Durano to process rocks chipped from tunnels dug out from the hills surrounding Aroroy. The tunnels are at least one kilometer to about five kilometers away from where the ball mills have been set up.

“Children should not be doing this hard labor but it’s the parents themselves who send their sons into this kind of work,” says Durano.

The task is not only hard and heavy but also dangerous. Each child has to walk at least a kilometer carrying 40 to 60 kilograms of rocks in sacks from tunnels that could collapse any time and trap chippers of possible gold ores inside.

In fact, two minors were found dead in a mining tunnel in Barangay Panique in July last year. The two apparently died from suffocation, the police said.

Durano says he is not employing children. But most of the time, small-scale miners who come to his ball mills to pan for gold are minors. Some of them are even school-aged.

Gold panning happens for an entire week although miners have breaks on Sundays.

In a day, hundreds of ball mills growl in Ambolong where most families subsist through small-scale mining.

Hard life

In this village, life is hard not only for the children and minors who engage in small-scale mining but also for small-scale operators of ball mills like Durano.

Every week, he has to spend P10,000 for mercury, which is sold by traders in the town proper. He needs a kilogram of the toxic heavy metal per week.

Mercury is used in panning for gold because it easily combines or amalgamates with gold from ores. Gold is extracted from the amalgam by heating.

The high toxicity of mercury is the primary reason its use is banned in other countries and in some provinces in the country, including Kalinga.

But authorities in Masbate, like in many provinces elsewhere, have only gone as far as “discourage” its use.

Every day, gold panners “borrow” the mercury from him. One-fourth kilogram of mercury is consumed in a day.

The exposure to mercury adds to the problems that face gold panners in Aroroy.

Durano also needs six liters of diesel a day to run the ball mills for 12 hours so that the soaring pump price of petroleum drastically cuts into his daily income that he needs to sustain 10 children.

Another cause for his dwindling income is the maintenance and fixing of the ball mills, which conk out usually once every five months.

“Bad” day comes for him and the gold panners when the rocks yield no gold even after a day of toil.

But even “lucky” days are not much different from the bad days. Hours of gold panning, on the average, produce only at most 3 grams of gold nugget.

“It’s frustrating because of the expenses. It’s also frustrating for the panners because processing of the ores can be tiring to the arms and back,” says Durano.

Every month, however, Durano gets a profit of at least P10,000 when trucks from large-scale mining firms come to get the tailings from the pond where gold panning is done.

“Because they have better and more advanced equipment, they (big mining firms) are still able to extract gold from the leftovers of the gold panners,” he adds.

Long haul

Durano buys the gold extracted from ores by panners for P1,200 a gram. He, in turn, sells the gold nuggets to gold traders for P1,500 per gram. Not counting all the overhead expenses, his net income on a lucky day amounts to P1,000. It is a different story on those days when he is not lucky.

He personally operates the ball mills so he knows every procedure of trying to find gold.

First, is the chipping of rocks in the tunnels. Second, is the transporting of the possible ores to the ball mills. Third, is the grinding of the rocks inside the ball mills. Fourth, is the amalgamating of gold in mercury-filled basins. Last is the heating of the amalgams to release mercury and extract pure gold.

Each procedure is equally laborious and dangerous with the heavy weight and possible exposure to mercury.

But despite the odds, Durano sees his operation of the ball mills as a long-term source of income.

“I just accept and accept rocks. I just count on the lucky days,” he says.

Many other small-scale miners and small-scale operators in Aroroy confront similar situations.

Aroroy is one of the areas in the Bicol region that is rich in gold deposits. The Masbate Gold Project, a joint Australian-Filipino mining venture, operates the country’s largest gold mine in Aroroy, the northernmost municipality in the main island of Masbate.