EVEN DIWALWAL'S children take part in the perilous search and are involved in nearly all aspects of gold production. Teen-age boys do adult work: they search for gold ore in tunnels 100 meters deep or operate ball mills where they crush the ore and mix it with mercury to flush out gold. Younger children scavenge for ore and carry timber or heavy baskets of food. In bars like the Diwata Mountain Lodge, nubile teen-agers strip on stage, displaying breasts and pubes to off-duty miners, some of whom are not much older than they are.

	HEAVY BURDEN. Adolescent workers carry sack of gold ore up and down a steep mountain path.

One luminous Sunday morning in October, 11-year old Albert Melendez brought four of his friends, the youngest of them nine, the oldest, 13, to the spillway, a gushing waterfall on the eastern side of Diwalwal's main road. The waterfall flows into a riverbed, beside which lie some of the biggest gold tunnels. Every morning, children and adults, most of whom are women, stand on the jagged rocks of the riverbed, waiting for the mine workers to unload gold ore from metal wagons into a chute.

Everyone looks up when they hear the wagons clanking on the railway that snakes out of the tunnels. The workers scream, "Tao! Tao!," to warn the small crowd below that they are about to tip the wagons over. The screams send the bystanders scampering to the far end of the river, lest they get caught in the ore avalanche. When it is over, they scramble for odd-sized pieces of ore which accidentally fall into the riverbed, instead of the chute. Albert and his friends join the scramble, putting the large pieces of ore that they salvage into plastic sacks.

Later, they smash the ore into smaller pieces, using a metal rod as a hammer. They then put the ore back into a sack and take turns carrying the load one kilometer up the hill to a gold-buying station. There, they are offered P50 for their find by a pot-bellied, crew-cut dealer wearing a medallion of the Virgin Mary on a thick gold chain around his neck. It is all the children get for an entire morning's hard work.

The boys say they get headaches from the heavy work and the heat, but the money they earn puts more rice on the dinner table. Their fathers, like most of those who labor in the tunnels, come from poor Mindanao provinces. They work in badly lit mine shafts buttressed by the trees that grew in Mt. Diwata's once-lush forests. Although the pay can be high, up to 10 times the minimum wage when they strike gold, the work is hard and dangerous. It entails spending interminable hours inside precariously-constructed tunnels, cave-like structures that stretch for kilometers into Diwata's deepest entrails.

The tunnels are dark, wet and muddy. Often, a veil of smoke covers them because miners use dynamite to blast the mountain's unyielding rock. To get to the mine pit, workers have to climb down rickety wooden ladders that plunge 100 meters or more into the deepest shafts. It is like descending into hell, and the tunnel itself is like a huge sepulcher. The constant haze from the dynamite smoke adds to the eeriness. It also makes the miners' throat itch and their heads throb. Down there, it is easy to imagine death, entombment.

No wonder 16-year old Alvin Makaslig says a prayer every time he enters a tunnel. A migrant from Panabo, Davao del Norte, Alvin was brought to Diwalwal by a townmate who helped him find work. In the mine pit, Alvin gathers pieces of ore into sacks and loads them into the wagons. He enters the tunnel before noon, he says, and works through the night, emerging 15 or 16 hours later, not knowing whether it is night or day.

Accidents inside the tunnel are common, says Alvin. Some of the workers don't even wear hard hats to protect their heads from falling rocks. Most of the actual mining work is done by hand, with little light, using heavy mallets and metal stakes that chip at the ore but also injure miners. Alvin says workers often fall from the ladders into the pit below, and some are electrocuted by live wires that get wet from the constantly dripping water inside the tunnels. On a good week, Alvin can earn up to P2,000. It is perilous, back-breaking work, but the money feeds his family back — in Panabo and sends seven of his siblings to school.