This story just breaks my heart (child artisanal mining!)

[kevinbgoode1]

With his Hulk cartoon T-shirt and his solemn face, Stephane Kapenda looks even younger and smaller than his 12 years. He knows he shouldn’t be here. But for years he has hauled tainted soil from this toxic waste pit into dirty pools of water so that he can search for bits of copper.

“It’s bad,” he says quietly. “I would like to leave it and go to school.”

Asked what is the worst thing about the work, he thinks for a moment and then whispers: “The sickness.”

Twice, the effects of heavy-metal contamination have been so severe that he needed hospital treatment. Yet he keeps at it, alongside his siblings, to scrounge a tiny income for his parents – impoverished farmers who could not otherwise survive.

About 200 to 300 children toil daily in this vast open pit, a bleak wasteland outside a copper and zinc mine at Kipushi in the southeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, near the Zambian border.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/young-and-dying-the-scandal-of-artisanal-mining/article4487572/

This is just so very wrong on so many levels!

[2on2u]

1. Just wait until we bring them democracy. n/t

[grntuscarora]

2. K/R.

This article should be posted in Good Reads, too!