Apprentice in Start Your Own Gold Mine program and supervisor Gaetano mounting metal parts of pickaxes onto its handles

The quality of pickaxes in East Africa is terrible. They are sold in parts, metal pickaxe part is sold separate from wooden handles and neither the metal part nor the wooden handles are all the same, so they have to be prepared and mounted together before any small scale mining work can start.

This type of work took about two days to finish, without it, it would not be possible to dig all the alluvial mining pits later in time.