I was just on a speaking tour in South Africa. My host Sean O’Keeffe of O’Keeffe & Swartz made sure I didn’t have a a dull moment. We visited one of Johannesburg’s many gold mines. This gold mine was 9000 feet deep! We descended to 750 feet and took a 45 minute tour.
Sean and his sons Kyran and Callan deep in the mine. The whole mine is blasted right out of the rock. The rock is taken up, smashed into dust, and then the gold is extracted.
Each of these carts holds one ton of rock. Three of these carts yield one whopping ounce of gold! Now I know why my wife’s jewelry is so expensive!
Before 1925, the workers worked by candle light. It was not romantic, it was brutal. They used picks and hammers to make holes in the rock. They put dynamite into the holes, left the mine, blasted the dynamite, then four hours later, after the dust settled, they went back in to haul the rock out.
Sean’s grandfather worked in the mines as a ventilation specialist and died in a rockfall in the mine.
Today they use the machine gun looking, high pressure water blaster to dig the dynamite holes.
This is tough work. Definitely hard labor. If you are working down at the bottom of the mine at 9000 feet, it takes 2 hours to get back to the surface. A tough commute!
African rickshaw driver outside the gold mine (you can see Sean’s boys in the back).
Next time you are not too happy with your job, remember, you could be working in a mine in South Africa!
Olympic Motivational Speaker Ruben Gonzalez
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