Pantukan

I was invited to a day trip from another NGO (SILDAP) to Pantukan in Compostela Valley (about 3 hrs north of Davao). Actually I thought I was visiting a village affected by mining but instead I landed up visiting an indigenous community doing mining. These indigenous people in the area are called Mansaka and as I noticed most of the community members go to church and mix their traditional customs with christian ones. The Mansaka houses are scattered over several hills and most of the man are working down at the river site and extract "maragaha" (black sand with gold crystalls) from the river mud. 

Upstream a big company started a large scale project already 20 years ago and the small scale miners downstream are suffering from the polluted river, so in a way they are also affected by other mining projects. 

A Mansaka woman showed us how to extract the actual gold from the maragaha. The magic tool is mercury, it will be added to the maragaha on the round plate and the gold can be carefully washed out. But it is very laborious work because you need a lot of mud to gain some maragaha and than you need lots of maragaha to extract a gram of gold. Because the river doesn't always offer enough gold for survival the people also do farming.

It was quite a trip, 

coming from Davao I took a bus for 2 hours, a motorcycle ride for another hour and another 30 minutes "habal-habal" (a ride with a (often transformed) motorcycle on a very stony road, usually to place which can't be reached otherwise). Indeed, the road had many slopes and was in an incredibly bad condition. I always wonder how the drivers can manage to get along with no accidents. 

The landscape in this region is awesome but all the hiking (uphill and downhill) plus the many rides are very exhausting. However, it was worthwhile!