There are lots of gold mines in My Country. The other day I went to visit the one closest to my house in the village, just to see what it actually looked like out there. As I was there, I got to spend time with a leader in the squatter village that sprung up around this new gold mining site. He’s from my village and is related to lots of people I know, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to really talk to him before that day.
Anyway, as we were chatting, we started talking about gold. He said that at some point in the past, people had come to My Country and had done a survey of mineral deposits (or something like that), and found that there was no gold at all in My Country. But then a well-loved but short-lived past president of the country went to Saudi Arabia and prayed/blessed the country. And this man that I was chatting with was convinced that it was because of that prayer/blessing that there is now gold deposits in My Country. I’m not totally convinced of the veracity of his statement, but it sure helps to understand their mindset and worldview when you hear them say things like this!
(Another crazy, did-I-hear-that-right moment, occurred the other night in the village. I meandered over to my host mom’s house, and sat down by my 17-year-old host sister who was watching a video on her phone. It was almost over, but she tried to catch me up a little bit. “This guy is explaining to the other guy that this lady died. The one guy didn’t know that she had died and was quite distraught, because he had married her and didn’t know that he had married a corpse.” Then we see that he gets home and sees his wife, who then says that she did it because she loved him so much, then she keels over and kind of dies and kind of melts. Umm, ok. I think I’m missing something here!)
Just finished reading Savage Harvest by Carl Hoffman about the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller in remote New Guinea. Finding gold & precious stones in that area wasn’t believed, but bits of it was found there.