Koidu, Sierra Leone – By late morning in Seidu, a remote village in the Koidu area of eastern Sierra Leone, the cracks, scrapes and thuds of metal shovels being plunged into rock-filled earth ring out again and again.
It is the sound of a dozen miners – many wearing worn-down baseball caps and shredded T-shirts covered in holes – desperately ploughing this opencast pit filled with reddish mud in search of a fortune.
