“I was staying with my friend, Claudine*, who was selling beer but also sleeping with men for money,” she says. But after days of trawling the town and finding no jobs, she started to get desperate. ‘Sometimes they force you to have sex’ĭeborah came to Luhihi when a friend told her that she might be able to find work in one of the makeshift restaurants or bars that had just sprung up. Faced with few alternatives in an impoverished region, ravaged by insecurity, they sell their bodies to put food on the table. In the evenings, women and girls working as prostitutes – some as young as 14 – linger on muddy street corners, waiting for customers. Miners still mill around, especially in the evenings, but the town is not the bustling place it once was. Those photographed are waiting for their friends to emerge from underground with sacks of earth Īt its height, the Luhihi gold rush also attracted a lot of enterprising businessmen who erected bars, brothels, clubs and gambling dens at the bottom of the valley. They take it in turns to go 30m deep into the holes. Miners linger at the mouths of tunnels, dug into the hillside, in Luhihi. Lots of people have already drifted off to try their luck at other sites, says one young miner, after clambering out of a tunnel wearing a head torch. Some sit at the mouths of the pits, smoking cigarettes while they wait for their friends to emerge from deep within. Many miners are already frustrated, though, and say they have not found gold in months. They hope that nestled somewhere amid the grit they will spot a glinting speck of gold.
They now spend their days underground, shovelling earth into sacks. They dug tunnels, some as deep as 30 metres, into the hillside. Within weeks, hundreds of miners had turned up with spades and pickaxes. Then, in May 2020, a man found a large lump of gold and the news quickly spread across the region. People first started digging in Luhihi in 2014, but when deposits seemed to dry up, most went elsewhere. She moved here a year ago, soon after the most recent gold rush began. Deborah looks at herself in a broken shard of mirror in her room as she prepares to go out ĭeborah, who is 17, works as a prostitute in Luhihi, a town on the edge of a gold mine in South Kivu in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). She often comes here at night when she is looking for clients. This place will fill up in the evening, Deborah says, but right now most men are up on the hillside, digging for gold. A small group of people are huddled at a table. Inside it is dark, except for some disco lights that flash green and red. It is only 2pm but drunk men are already hovering at the door, necking beers and milky glasses of moonshine. On the corner, fuzzy beats emanate from a tin-roofed nightclub. Luhihi, Democratic Republic of the Congo – Deborah* walks down a mud alley between houses cobbled together with plywood and sheets of tarpaulin.
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