Debi Eernisse

“Elodie was orphaned by cobalt mining. She said her father died in a tunnel collapse at the KCC site in August 2017. I could not find any public reports of the collapse, although others in Kapata remembered it. Elodie’s mother had died around a year before her father. She washed stones at Lake Malo, and as best as Elodie could recall, her mother contracted an infection from which she was unable to recover. After the loss of her parents, Elodie said she turned to prostitution to survive. Soldiers and artisanal miners purchased her regularly. “The men in Congo hate women,” she said. “They beat us and laugh.” Elodie became pregnant. After her son was born, she started digging at Lake Malo. She said that prostitution and digging for cobalt were the same—“Muango yangu njoo soko.” My body is my marketplace. Elodie slept in an abandoned, half-finished brick hut near the southern edge of Kapata with a group of orphaned children. The children were known as shegués, a word derived from”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives