The place was alive with activity. A swarm of men and women, more than a hundred of them, were already hard at work on the tiered, filthy plateau cut away beneath us. The expanse of raw dirt was at least ten times the size of the football pitch at school, ragged edged, multi-levelled, a great scab picked off the face of the earth. When I say men and women hard at work, I mean exactly that: everywhere I looked men were wielding shovels and picks and filling bags with dirt and hefting those bags this way and that, heaping them in little pyramids down below for other men to lug up to that lip while yet more men hacked rock from the wall over there for others to shovel into heaps to be picked through by … my eyes snagged on the four little guys at work not fifty metres away.

They weren’t little men; they were children.

And in fact, looking harder at the scene, there were other children, kids way younger than me, at work among the adults. Instinctively I stepped forward, camera raised, to take a closer look, but I hadn’t taken many shots or steps before a man with his back to me cradling his shovel in his arms turned round to reveal that the shovel was in fact a rifle. Seeing me advancing, with Caleb and Amelia just a few metres behind me, as pinkly out of place as I was, , he shouted something unintelligible in French. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand him, because he brought his gun up onto his hip at the same time, making it very clear that if I took another step he’d shoot.

52.

I stayed where I was, welded to the spot.

Caleb, however, was undeterred by the man’s gun. ‘Francis!’ he said. ‘Tell this idiot who we are.’