PHILIPPINES-ECONOMY/MINING (INSIGHT, PIX):INSIGHT-Toxic, deadly, cheap: Life for women gold miners in the Philippines
SAGADA/PARACALE, Philippines, – I t's a man's world mining gold in the Philippines – but it's the women who come off worst.
Be it cooking toxic pans of mercury, scouring mud pools for cheap slivers of hope or sluicing the boggy soil – women do the hardest jobs and get paid the least.
One in three of the illegal mining workforce is female – and women are 90 times more at risk of dying on the job than men.
“There are a lot of women in the mines, but they are invisible,” Meggy Katigbak, an expert on small-scale gold mining, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The work is illegal, makeshift – and doesn't even pay well.
But they've been mining this way for centuries in Paracale, a colonial, coastal city whose name means ‘canal digger' after gold-hungry colonial powers swooped in to make their fortunes.
They are still scouring – and dreaming big – today.
“Life here is hard, but my children give me strength to do this. They're my life,” Christy Ortiz told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Like any other day, 44-year-old Ortiz rose at dawn, waking first to cook for her seven children, before setting out to hunt for gold in a homemade mine she had dug from rice paddies and filled with muddy water.
Ortiz and her husband practice compressor mining – the world's most dangerous gold extraction method and one that is only found in her little corner of the Philippines.
Manila banned it in 2012 for its grave safety risks and health hazards – a matter of no care to the Ortiz family.
As Ortiz looked on, her husband dove 10 feet under, breathing through a tube he had connected to a compressor, which pipes air underwater and is her family's prized possession.
Ortiz paid 29,000 pesos for the machine, using money she had amassed through years of scrimping, carefully saving her state welfare grants: money only given to the country's poorest.
While her husband waded underground for hours, filling buckets with dense soil, Ortiz performed all the above-ground rituals to extract whatever slivers of gold she could find.
With no protective equipment, she worked in the same white shirt and skirt that she wore at home.
There is little separating her work from home life.
“Sometimes I forget to eat breakfast, because I need to go straight to the mine after sending my kids to school,” said Ortiz.
Her feet soaked in muddy water, she mashed the soil and ran gloop through a sluice box made of wood and banana leaves, hoping the water might tease out even a sliver of gold.
Next Ortiz extracted the nuggets from a clag of soil and stones, using a traditional wooden tool, then cooked up the gold with mercury, a toxic metal used to separate gold from ore.
Her takings – one tiny piece of amber metal worth less than 200 pesos enough to get them through that day.
Luckier than yesterday, she said, when no gold came.
Ortiz said earnings ranged from zero to 1,000 pesos a day, so on lean days, Ortiz said she had to pull a double shift and go selling charcoal to the neighbours to feed her big family.
“I didn't want to do this forever — I wanted to go back to my hometown,” said Ortiz, who lives more than 1,000 km from her birthplace. “But I didn't want the people there to know that I've been struggling since I came here.”
HER HEALTH, HER BABY'S HEALTH
Some 15 million women work in the artisanal and small-scale gold mining sector globally, and an estimated 18,000 to 20,000 Filipino women and children take part in ASGM-related work.
