The second-largest town in Ratanakkiri province isn't on most maps of Cambodia. That s because Chum Beisrok, full of shacks, holes in the ground and ethnic Khmers and Vietnamese hoping to strike it rich, didn't exist until two years ago. About 15 km south of the provincial capital of Banlung, at the intersection of Lumphat Barkeo and Banlung districts, about 2,500 people dig for gems and other valuable minerals. The miners sleep in hammocks underneath the shells of homes still under construction or they rent space in houses recently completed. During the day, they work in groups, using hand tools to dig deep, narrow holes in search of gems and gold.
Children descend into the holes and pass up buckets of dirt, which are sifted through by hand.
At the end of the day, miners sell what they have found to middlemen. They buy what they need from the four or five small shops set up around the new homes. Two years ago, there were just 20 people mining, according to Jeremy Ironside, a consultant to Non-Timber Forest Products, an NGO in Banlung that works with hill tribes. But now it is a boom town. Chum Beisrok is like the wild west in America over 100 years ago, when there was gold, said Dr Seshu Babu, who recently visited the area with the National Malaria Center.