Blog Post
By Diego Arias Carballo
Carballo (MPA/ID), a recipient of the Roy Family Summer Fellowship, spent his summer doing research on gold mining Tanzania.
Mwanza, a growing city near Lake Victoria in Tanzania, is a disturbing combination of natural beauty and extreme poverty. Three large gold mining projects in the area have recently been approved by the government and there is much optimism in the city about the future.
But most of the gold mining in the region is not done through large-scale projects, but by individual miners who work through often unsavory dealers. The miners hope for the day when they will find a piece of gold big enough to allow them to support their families. Very few are so fortunate.
In order to clean the gold and separate it from other minerals, miners must handle mercury at several stages during the cleaning process. The mercury is very dangerous for the miners and is also a hazard to the local population. Contamination of the soil and water and direct inhalation of the fumes are the main dangers.
New technologies that process the mercury more efficiently are now available. These technologies could be produced by local craftsmen and would increase productivity and lower contamination levels. The focus of my project this summer was to convince the gold miners to change their historical traditions and adopt these new practices.
The miners were skeptical. They watched our demonstrations and listened to our explanations, but were not convinced. They were certain that their practices were better than ours.
After days of trying different strategies, we discovered that their disbelief sprang from a lack of transparency in our demonstrations. For example, one of the machines we used included a flask in which the gold was separated from other minerals. Because the flask was dark, the miners believed that some gold was being lost in the cleaning process. We immediately produced transparent glass flasks and tubes so that the miners could see the results with their own eyes.
I learned an important lesson in Lake Victoria last summer: as students we are accustomed to reading and hearing about theories and sometimes we forget that there is nothing more convincing than seeing something to believe it.
Information about the fellowship can be found at: http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/BCSIA/ENRP.nsf/web/FellowshipRoyFamily