Digging a trench under the punishing midday sun, Thomas Lokinga stops only when he needs to wipe the sweat from his face. He is determined to find a nugget of gold amid the hard-baked ground in Nanakanak, in the eastern part of South Sudan, the world's newest nation.
He's one of about 60,000 gold diggers in South Sudan unearthing an estimated $660 million worth of gold each year, according to one international mining expert. These finds have sparked a gold rush in the nation's east — a region that long was a flash point in the country's nearly 50-year-old civil war.
With so many diggers, nuggets are getting harder to find.
Lokinga says he used to find a gram of gold a day and now it takes 10 days of nonstop work. He says the dreams of wealth have attracted hordes of people including women and children, scratching out an existence after years of poor agricultural harvests.
"All over here people are doing this work," Lokinga says. "Children and women and even elderly people inside the bushes, all just leaving their homes and looking for something to eat."
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