A Sierra Leonean village has been hit with tragedy after two teenage boys were buried underneath a collapsed mine in the nation’s Eastern province.
Families and friends of the victims gathered together in tears as the bodies of the boys, wrapped in white cloths, were returned by authorities.
The day before, 16-year-old Mohamed Bangura and 17-year-old Yayah Jenneh left their homes in Nyimbadu, in the country’s Eastern Province, hoping to earn a little extra money for their families, per a BBC report.
They had gone in search of gold but never came back because the makeshift pit they were digging in collapsed on them.
Their death marks the third fatal mine accident, leaving a total of at least five children dead, in the last four years in the same region.
According to headteachers and community activists, Mohamed and Yayah were part of a phenomenon that has seen a growing number of children missing school in parts of Sierra Leone to mine the precious metal in potentially lethal pits.
For decades, the Eastern Province has been known for diamond mining, yet in recent years, informal – or artisanal – gold mining has widened as the diamond reserves have been depleted.
In Sierra Leone, mining sites pop up wherever local people find riches, be it on farmland, in former graveyards, or along riverbeds.
In this Sierra Leonean village, most families depend on small-scale farming and petty trading for a living, but the community in the town gathered at the local funeral home knows the work also comes at a price, with the loss of the two teens to the mines.
Yayah’s mother, Namina Jenneh, is a widow who was depending on her young son to help cater for her other five children.
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She worked in the pits herself, acknowledges that she introduced Yayah to mining, but says: “He didn’t tell me he was going to that site – if I had known I would have stopped him.”
Once she heard about the collapse, she says she rushed to beg someone to “call the excavator driver.”
“When he arrived, he cleared the debris that had buried the children.” Nonetheless, it was too late to save them.
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The Eastern province of Sierra Leone has seen multiple young people fall into situations like these in the last five years. Locals in the village say the government of Sierra Leone has been alerted about the situation in relation to the mines, but very few efforts have been made to reverse it.
