Mgussu

I don't exactly want to write about everything that happened yesterday, because the things I saw weren't pretty and aren't going to be nice to read about... but I think that it's important to know what goes on in the world beyond our realms of comfort and familiarity, so here we go.

Yesterday morning we left Geita and headed to a village called Mgussu on the other side of the mountains where the gold mines are. On the drive out, we passed by a crowd of one hundred people or so on the side of the road and slowed down to see why they were all collected there. As we got closer, we saw a man lying on the side of the road, nearly dead. He'd just been stoned by that crowd of people for stealing 1 kg of beans, and the police officer who stood nearby was apparently only there for crowd control.

I looked away as quickly as I could, but even that quick glance was enough to burn the image in my mind for forever. Sitting there smashed in the back seat of a car between three other people, I couldn't stop the tears from coming. It was a pretty awful scene. I can understand to an extent why vigilante justice exists here. The entire justice system is corrupt, so when theives and murderers are let out of prison after just a few days when the right people are paid, this ensures that they won't come back and no one person in the community can be prosecuted for murder. It's just still a hard thing to comprehend and even harder to see.

Anyway, after that we arrived in Mgussu, a village right by the gold mines where money flows just about as fast as the alcohol or as quickly as the water flows through the streets like rivers when it rains. Daniel told me that according to a study group that came through the area recently, 98.7% of the prostitutes there are HIV positive, the highest rate out of all 6,000 other areas this group surveyed.

Here's a girl that I met in the village taking care of a baby who is probably her sister. They were both really cute.



After holding a seminar in the church in Mgussu, we drove to the big gold mines and looked at how open pit mining is done. Entire mountains are moved and literally set down piece by piece, upside down, in a new spot. The chemicals the mines use for processing the gold are stored in a giant man-made lake that a security guard told us killed nineteen cows within minutes who drank from it a few weeks ago. The money all leaves the country and goes to foreign countries, and the workers are treated badly. It was fascinating to see the rock layers as they defaced entire mountains just to get some sparkly powder. Here is a small portion of a mine.



Anyway, that was my day. It made me sad, angry, and thankful all at once... the latter mostly because it reminded me not to take my home for granted.