But December 1993 was probably my best, celebrating it with five parties in three countries which are not even Christian. Although our work in Thailand was winding up, we went to Laos, across the Mekong River, after completing a technical review of exploration projects in Asia and the Pacific. We headed to Manado, capital of the Indonesian province of North Sulawesi, for our annual review of Newmont Mining’s projects in Asia (Newmont is the world’s largest gold mining company), and then to Mesel, south of Manado, for more discussions—and holiday partying afterwards.

In Mesel, we found a gold deposit similar to what Newmont discovered in Nevada in the 1960s: It was hosted in sedimentary rocks (beach rocks like limestone, sand and mud) instead of volcanic rocks as in Baguio City’s gold district. This unique occurrence became one of the largest types of gold deposits, producing 5,000 tons to date (160 million ounces); at least another 3,000 tons remain unexploited.

Baguio mines have produced 25 million ounces of gold worth almost $50 billion at today’s prices. (In one estimate I was involved in, about one million ounces remained in one of the major mines.) Mesel looked similar to the gold mines in Surigao and Davao. 

The other expat geologists at Newmont thought the Mesel deposit was volcanic-hosted gold, noticing the sedimentary rocks are covered by volcanics which are the preferred host of gold in what are classified as epithermal gold deposits like in Baguio. I told them it was sediment-hosted. (I was the only Newmont geologist in Asia at that time who had visited the company’s mines in Nevada.) Mesel’s some 2 million ounces of gold is small. 

We also discovered a huge gold and copper deposit called Batu Hijau (Green Rock) in Sumbawa, east of Bali, with about one billion tons containing 0.4% copper and 0.3-gram-per-ton gold, or 10 million ounces of gold and 400 million tons of copper, worth $19 billion of gold and a staggering $34.4 billion of copper. Not surprisingly, a recent report said Batu Hijau—in operation since 2000—had produced at least six billionaires, none of them geologists!

If you’re wondering why North Sulawesi, along with the Philippines’ Mindanao, are well-endowed with epithermal gold, including Carlin types and porphyry copper, here is a “quick-and-dirty, back-of-the-envelope” explanation.

‘Filipino roads’

This area of North Sulawesi was heavily logged by a Filipino-owned logging company. According to our Indonesian woman office manager named Cory, who married and later divorced a Filipino from Floridablanca, Pampanga, the loggers left at least a dozen children in the village. 

To this day, the logging roads are called “Filipino roads.” One of them exposed an outcrop of a jasperoid, a silicified limestone with 1–>10 grams per ton (g/t), which led to the discovery at Mesel of a sediment-hosted gold deposit.

Australian geologist Dave Hoyal stumbled upon the strange-looking rock, which the Australians, British, and Kiwis all agreed to be a silicified andesite breccia. Thus, Mesel was initially known as a volcanic breccia-hosted gold prospect. 

When we reached Mesel in the early afternoon, we were told that we should attend a church service in Ratatotok, a Christian (Protestant) community about 4 kilometers away. Some of us who had not seen each other for a long time decided to start the party right away. Beer and peanuts appeared and a quick toast was offered for the year’s successes—the discoveries of millions of pounds of copper and millions of ounces of gold deposits in Batu Hijau.

Henry Wong, a Malaysian-Australian project geologist, didn’t want to go to church, and tried to justify his decision: “It’s enough for geologists to go to church three times—when being baptized, you don’t know what’s going on anyway; when you die and you don’t know anything anyway; and when you get married …” He trailed off, so I quipped, ”Getting married? You don’t know what you’re doing!”  

Everyone laughed, to my surprise. Then it occurred to me that the incidence of divorce among British, Australians and Kiwis in the room was high. So I laughed, too. (Actually, among the married geologists present, I was the only one not divorced.)

When the church-goers among us came back, the sound system was on and I had enough alcohol in me to start the party by grabbing an electric guitar and singing Neil Young’s “Four Strong Winds,” followed by John Denver’s “Country Road.” I remember Sam Adams, the vice president for exploration of Anaconda Mining and the president of the Society of Economic Geologists, and his wife dancing and singing to the music. 

I was quickly joined in the singing by Don Clarke, an Australian geochemical consultant for Newmont/Newcrest Corp., and some of the Indonesians, like the guitar-playing geologist Agus. (Clarke christened my sexy and informative sections and maps “romigrams.”) 

Soon enough, John Dow, the vice president for exploration of Newmont Indonesia and later the president of Newmont Mining, joined the fray, singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight.” That ballad stopped the adrenaline. We let the regular band take over and went back to drinking. 

Tasting everything

At Newmont’s Christmas parties, you got the choice of beer, red and white wines, as well as liquors and spirits. One ended up tasting everything, except Bir Bintang, because on regular days we were entitled to two cans of beer a day. We sometimes saved our cans and drank everything on weekends. The Indonesians who did not drink saved their rations in boxes for birthday parties.

Soon, Richard Lindsay, our project manager, found out what was going on and had it stopped. Sometimes, though, we would find the slightest reason to run to the beaches of Ratatotok district for a dip and a barbecue party. There would also be weekend music and dancing in the dining hall (sometimes even on ordinary nights when somebody felt really lonely). 

In one night of revelry, the dancing got so hot that Dave Hoyal, who was performing a series of hops and jumps, broke the flooring. At times, I was the DJ (minus the mic) and played dance music from the Beatles to Billy Idol and, occasionally, country and western music like Seals and Crofts.

The next day, I was having coffee with Glenn White, a Kiwi project geologist, and Sam Adams, who was nursing a hangover. White said John Dow should not be revealing sensitive secrets like how long Newmont’s reserves would last (about 10 years) if the current rate of mining production (about 2 million ounces per year) continued. 

I dryly told White not to worry because we had just found 12 million ounces in Indonesia, probably good for another six years. Also, one didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to deduce this from Newmont’s annual reports, to the delight of Adams and Matthew Farmer, another Kiwi project geologist. Farmer was fond of using the phrase “rocket science” in everyday geological conversation.

King and Queen

I found myself in North Jakarta for the next Christmas party held at a bayside resort called Ancol Dreamland. Helen, one of the office staff girls, performed a faithful rendition of Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman.” I was glad I did not have to sing that time. 

Part of the party program was to elect the night’s King and Queen. The pretty secretary barefootin’ in 1987 won handily. For the King’s crown, it was a close fight between John Dow and myself. Dow was the boss, so I voted for him. 

I recalled Dow shouting at our table, “How many times did you vote?” To which I complained: “This is the first time an Aquino lost an election.” The boss should have been excluded. Dow was fond of using the phrase “fair enough,” but this one was not a fair election. What is, then? 

Later, the office girls asked me something that had been bothering them since I left for Thailand. They had heard from the Indonesians (Irwan, a geophysicist, and Marcie, a geologist) who worked with me there that the Thai girls were prettier than Indonesians. I had to give a reassuring (diplomatic) answer: Girls in Thailand are as pretty as those in Indonesia and the Philippines. They are equally beautiful. 

But I must admit that in Chiang Mai, I fell in love up to 10 times on the way to the office. In Jakarta, maybe once or twice only. As soon as they exclaimed, “What?!” I said that that would happen once I reach the office.

The Christmas party at the field camp in the Newmont-owned Batu Hijau, a gold and copper deposit on Sumbawa Island, 1,530 km east of Jakarta, was quite modest and uneventful. In fact, I don’t remember a thing about it; we were that drunk.

For our Christmas parties in Thailand and Laos, Alan Flint, the regional manager for Asia, planned a cruise on the Nam Ngum Lake in central Laos. Everyone signed up and one chilly morning, we boarded an aging boat. Flint was hardly seen in the boat.

I slept till the early afternoon after all the partying in Indonesia. I woke up only when the boat’s engine finally cranked.

The boat stopped at a picturesque corner of the lake, in a misty rain forest with chirping birds. Some of us took a dip but found the waters too cold for comfort. But the previous night’s alcohol finally got burned, preparing us for another night of drinking and dancing. 

The late afternoon till early evening was spent singing, with Tom, a Thai geologist, and myself alternately playing guitar. We stopped once the disco music was turned on. 

And that gave us the chance to dance with the pretty lasses of Laos, to Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” temporarily forgetting the lure of the yellow metals.

Postscript:

Newmont found only small and low-grade copper and gold prospects in Thailand and Laos. But in Indonesia, the discovery of more copper and gold deposits was announced, including one found earlier in a place called Dodo (16 km east of Batu Hijau). It has similar amounts of contained copper and gold. It was initially thought of as a low-grade gold deposit in volcanics. 

Newmont is a pure gold company, looking mainly for gold. But this writer advised management that gold-rich porphyry copper deposits (like Atlas Mining and Philex in the Philippines) could be mined as gold deposits. Thus, the other prospect was not “dead as a dodo”; it was renamed Elang (eagle). 

There was another prospect called “kudamati” (dead horse) near Dodo. One wonders.

Romeo S. Aquino is an exploration geologist who has worked here and abroad since 1974 with geological teams that found large copper and gold deposits in Indonesia, Peru and China. He started “fact-checking” news and online columns more than 10 years ago. —Ed.

Read more: To nourish a legacy of criticism and scholarship in the academe

The post 5 Christmas parties while exploring for mines in 3 countries appeared first on CoverStory.

The auto repair shop that took Al and for which he works up to now is also an established one, though, with many branches. He does anything and everything an auto mechanic does, from disassembly and assembly to acetylene welding and fabrication.

Al has a wife and child and dreams of having his own family home someday. He says that more than money, he wants good health for himself and his family. He does not consider his diminutive size a hindrance and says he is happy at work. He gets along well with his coworkers and goes out with them after hours, saying it is important to be “marunong makisama.”

Related: In 2022, crisis in incomes and jobs pummeled labor sector

The post The Mechanic (a real one) appeared first on CoverStory.

They work on fabrics and sewing machines to produce bags of all shapes and sizes—totes, “ecobags,” shoe bags, envelope bags, lunch bags, laundry bags. For six days of work a week, they take home P1,800, or P300 a day.  

Since 2016, through the organization Solidarity with Orphans and Widows (SOW), the Vincentian priests who run the nearby church have been helping the women start afresh after losing their menfolk to the government’s “war on drugs.”  

Giving the women a decent job is part of the priests’ holistic approach that consists of therapy including counseling, art and Bible reading sessions that have later diversified into seminars on mental health, human rights, and financial literacy. 

Every second and fourth Saturday of the month, the priests, counselors and formators hold separate sessions with the widows as well as teenagers and toddlers, including those who witnessed masked men shoot their fathers pointblank, to help them cope with the trauma and move forward.

‘The pain goes away’

“Here, we share our problems. The pain goes away,” Violeta Isip, 68, a tailor at the SOW shop on Leyte Street, told CoverStory.ph. “We’re happy here.” 

Isip’s son-in-law, Ernesto Godoy, was killed by masked men early in 2017. 

Since Godoy’s murder, Isip has taken it upon herself to tend to his widow, her daughter Angelita, and her grandson James. She is helped in her task by her work at the shop. 

Now a senior high school student at 22, James enjoys a scholarship from SOW, like most of the orphans.   

On Jan. 1, 2017, Godoy went out with two other men and never came home. After a fruitless search in police precincts, his family heard from a jeepney passenger that a man in his 30s was gunned down by masked men the night before. It turned out to be him.  

Angelita Godoy, who is afflicted with a lung ailment, was too sick to even attend her husband’s wake. Until now she stays home, still grappling with her loss.

Godoy was one of over 100 men living in the slums of Payatas who were randomly executed in the early years of the drug war.  

Trash and drugs

Payatas is a sprawling barangay that is home to an open trash dump. While the dump was shuttered in 2017, the community of scavengers around it thrived on picking recyclables from the trash trucked in from around Quezon City.    

Drugs, specifically crystal meth, or shabu, were peddled as easily as the recyclables sold to junk shops. Then President Rodrigo Duterte unleashed a bloody campaign against drug users and dealers as soon as he took office in June 2016. 

As the wakes for the victims began spilling into the streets, the Vincentian priests worked round the clock, from officiating at funeral masses for those killed to helping pay for the cost of their burial that went as high as P95,000. It didn’t help that after each killing, scene-of-the-crime operatives supposedly always had a crew from a favored funeral home in tow.  

“At its height in October, November, December 2016, we were burying eight to 10 persons a week,” Fr. Danilo Pilario told CoverStory.ph. “There was a time they rounded up 100 in a raid on a drug den; they killed eight people.” 

A wave of fear swept through the barangay. Neighbors stayed away from the wakes, leaving the bereaved family alone to deal with the loss of a loved one and also the stigma of having harbored a “drug suspect.” 

There was no “sakla” (a card game played by mourners often until the wee hours), and therefore, there was no “tong” (a percentage of the winnings from the game) for the bereaved family. 

In the noisy and nosey communities of Payatas, the wakes became quiet family affairs.

Search for justice   

When the Vincentians met with 12 families for the first time on Dec. 30, 2016, on the heels of the killings, the widows voiced a common lament:  None of our neighbors came to the wake to ask what had happened.  

The widows’ main request was for the group to meet regularly.  

“So their primary need is about acceptance, a search for justice, for vindication that their loved ones were not criminals,” said Pilario, who ministered to the widows and orphans. 

“One of them said, ‘Yes, my husband used shabu, but did they need to kill him?’” the priest said.

The SOW project drew as many as 35 families at its peak. The number has since thinned to 26 families, with some relocating to the provinces and others lying low due to the stigma of the drug war. 

The killings, though lessened in number, continued throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. Four families of victims of extrajudicial killings joined SOW during the pandemic, and another one last January. 

Authorities have pegged the death toll during Duterte’s watch at more than 6,200, but rights groups claim the number is much higher.  

According to Dahas (@DahasPH), which keeps tabs on the killings, 281 men have died in drug-related killings under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. as of May 7. 

Valuing work and worth 

The tailoring shop has been banking on the orders of customers, including Ever Gotesco mall in Quezon City, to become sustainable and thrive. 

“We’re just breaking even,” SOW coordinator Diding Libao admitted. 

But no one among the staff, trained by couple Tony and Lita Conse who also lost a son-in-law to the drug war, is complaining. Over time, they have learned to value their work and worth.   

At the height of the pandemic lockdowns, when many of their neighbors lost their daytime jobs, the widows received bulk orders from the Office of Vice President (OVP) Leni Robredo for personal protective equipment and face masks, for the use of medical front-liners across the country. 

The OVP’s orders sustained the shop during the pandemic, entailing overtime work for the widows, But they went home with bigger pay and a realization that they have “a decent standing” in the community, after all.  

Pilario said he could not forget what one of the women said during their moments of reflection: “You know, Father, my husband was killed by men wearing face masks (bonnets). Now, we’re the ones sewing face masks to keep people alive.” 

Waking up every day to go to the tailoring shop alone “vindicates them in the eyes of the community,” he added.

Where the Church should be  

The apparent special treatment for the widows and orphans didn’t go unnoticed in the parish and was the subject of certain complaints.  

Pilario was quick to come to their defense. “Where the victims are, there the Church should be,” said the priest, who teaches liberation theology and other courses at St. Vincent de Paul School of Theology in Quezon City.

The post In Payatas, the Church helps widows and orphans pick up the pieces appeared first on CoverStory.