I would like to start with a personal experience in artisanal mining. I was born in 1971 in Lima. I wanted to study to have a career but due to the critical economic situation in my country, I had to start working at an early age. At the time my mother was working in agriculture on the land of my grandparents, planting potatoes, corn, wheat, barley, and quinoa. So I along with her I started to work the land. I had food to eat, but my clothes and shoes started to wear off and our harvest was not enough for more. So I told my mum, I’m going to the mine. I knew that mining was very hard. At first I didn’t have enough money to cover my expenses for food. The only thing that kept me going was the thought that my mum and dad had many needs and the hope that I could do something for them. That’s how I started working more and I joined together with other people in the same situation and we started an association. We thought we would achieve nothing if we stayed separate, but that we could do great things together.
We suffered a lot during this process as we didn’t have the basics. We didn’t have any shelter, we needed water, food, but that’s how we started our project. With the passing of the days we realised that we were really far away from our families and wanted to be close to them. Some of my colleagues brought their children and wives to live with us and that’s how we started to understand that we have some basic needs to cover. We wanted to cover our families’ basic needs. That is how we started to organise our activities.
We started as an informal organization, using manual tools, and we carried the water on our shoulders up the hill. We entered the mine without any protective equipment and worked 12 hours a day. We felt the fatigue in our bodies and at the end of the day we went back to our shacks to rest.
As a group we started to think that we couldn’t carry on like this our whole lives and we needed to progress. So we started to buy machinery and formed ourselves as an organised community. We started a school so our children could go to school while we worked and we also opened a health centre. All this was coming from our own money.
We are located in a very, very remote place and not many people know about it. We started to work with more technology - for some companies it might be no technology at all but for us we saw a very big change as we started to care about the environment and our working conditions. We do not want our children to have the same life we have had; we want the best for them.
At the beginning there was no safety in the mine and life was difficult at that time. But now we make sure that our work is carried out safely and we try not to contaminate the environment. Previously, the entrance to the mine was a small hole with space for just one person; it was very traditional and difficult to enter. But now we work according to technical standards and have much more space so we can work faster and with more people. We also saved some money and bought a small train to transport ore in the mine. At the moment we are producing 50 tonnes of ore a day; in the past we used to do only one tonne per day.
Previously we worked with mercury to recover gold from the mined ore, but we knew that mercury is highly toxic, and that its use should be eliminated and I think this is one of the things that our organization has to support, so that cleaner techniques are used. At the moment we do not use mercury; it is said that mining is polluting, but I think if we use cleaner technologies and have qualified people, mining can be beneficial, productive and bring development to the communities.
Our small town consists of rustic houses, and some of them are pre-built. Having a pre-built house is a luxury for us we are proud of having achieved this. There is a small church which is another one of our achievements as we built it ourselves. At the beginning we didn’t have water to wash our dishes. The water was used just to prepare the little food we can cook. But now we have built a place to eat, like a restaurant for the miners.
Now with all the work that we have done, we are able to help the neighbouring communities. To get access to some of the towns around the valley, we needed to fix the road. So we rented machinery and invested some money and fixed the roads to connect the villages again. And sometimes when the river is high, we also help to de-block the roads, because the government does not help much.
Our goal is of course for our children to have a better future. We don’t want them to go through what we went through. We have a small school in our town. We want it to look a bit like the schools in the city. It may not be the same, but try to make our children have the same opportunities as the children in the cities, who have the intellectual capacity to choose a career and a future, a better way of live.
We have also invested in a health centre. We implemented hygiene measures and have a medical team who give basic supplies to the people and try to attend our workers and the rest of the population. We also invest in medicines because in the place where we live it is really difficult to get to big cities to get them. We try to store the basics and the minimum quantities suitable for the number of people living in the community.
Walter Elias Disney said: "If you can dream it, you can achieve it.” We dreamt and now we can say that with effort and determination we were able to make it reality. Now we hope that with our experience and the knowledge we gained we can contribute our bit to help other mining organisations who need our technical support to progress, change their living conditions and make each day pass better than the day before. We know this: Even if at first we feel there is no hope, we always have a vision that something will flourish.
