A New Place of Young Precious Stones
Tuesday, January 08, 2008 - by seiha
A group of people are digging for precious stones on a mountain where locate in Kirivong district Takeo province. On the mountain some of the gem hunters carry pitch-axe and the others handed other tools with expecting that they will find stones today. They speak without stopping their digging.
We were not able to have the stones assessed by a professional. But the gem diggers say people sometimes pay them 800.000 Riel ($200) per kilogram of the stones. And some rich people come to watch them dig and sometimes pushing the door open to try to buy them.
The gems were first discovered here in a year ago at three mountains namely Morhasey, Tambang Samlor, and Phnom Toteng. Ms. Phath Sam is an old woman who lives nearby says she had a dream.“There was an old man wearing with white told me that this is a mountain that has a lot of precious stones please did not move to other place.” said Phath Sam, an old woman lives nearby those mountains.
Her dream now come truth. Ms. Chum Yun and her term is a lucky group that found three Koyun of the stones in one hole at Phnom Toteng. And now her family’s living is better. Chum Yun siad, “most of the stones that my group found is light black, strong white and the side of the stones some are small and some are big like our arm and our thigh. And the merchants came to my whole and bought the stones. Our group gain nine thousands dollars for the three Koyun (small truck) of the stones, so we got fives million Rile for each.”
Mr. Reach On gets up at 4:00 in the morning with the food that his five has packed with a scarf. It’s now 9 o’clock his group has not discovered a place to find stones yet. He goes to hunt the gem everyday. And Reach On says that to find stones is very dangerous. Sometimes we can die immediately. “When I was digging I felt so afraid about landslide. I did not collect my stones all so that other people picked the stones up from my whole a lot, too. The whole villagers found the stones from my whole after me”, said Reach On.
However, an old people had gone in the mine hole because of landslide. But many people still want to take the risk. The chief of Prey Ampok commune, Mr. Ney Neang says about half of the people in the commune are looking for gems. Neang is happy the commune has stones. But he also has some worries. Ney Neang said, “if we based on the law it is illegal because the stones are in the public land. And if the top powers order me to do, I have no excuse. But until now the district authority have not taken action yet. They maybe thought that the villagers are so poor and for me I stand with the villagers.”
In Ratanakiri and Pieline, where there are gems things haven’t always gone so well. Some analysts say the people there are still poor and the money gems hasn’t made it into the national budget. The Excellencies of Takeo province was not available to comment for this story.
