When editing these videos, it became apparent what an extraordinary thing we witnessed. We journeyed to a network of villages that subsist on harvesting gold from the earth. We learned just how hard it is to extract gold and to amass it into quantities of value and significance. But more importantly, we saw the other end of the jewelry trade – we participated in the origins of someone’s wedding ring. There are 3 videos that really drive this point home. The first in this series is titled Americo Pans for Gold. In this, we see a demonstration of a seasoned vet move raw earth so gracefully. It is beautiful to watch him swirl his pan and to come up with gold. His is an elegance that is gained by hours and days and years of practice – like watching a master painter create a work of art. The second video in this series is titled Americo Separates the Gold. This clip shows the next step in the manual gold harvesting process – the daily gold collection and cleaning. It is wild to think about all the individuals who practice this seemingly arcane step daily. And the third video in this series really drives the point of the first two videos home. The 3rd is titled Bartering Gold for Cigarettes. This video defies comprehension and I would not believe my own eyes had we not been there to witness this first hand. This video shows how small daily collections of gold are aggregated into larger quantities that make their way down-river and into the world markets. Here we watch a man buy beer and a few cigarettes and pay for his goods with the gold flakes that he had harvested that day. Now remember – harvested gold is kept in small folded pieces of paper that substitute for wallets. So he buys his stuff from the local store and the woman weighs his gold against a known quantity and then scoops his flakes into a 40 gram vial. This is just awesome in its scope!
Enjoy -
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