By Chrispin Inambao
ORANJEMUND
Merlyn Araes works as a mineralogical technician in an office rigged with a vast array of both covert and overt security cameras.
The office is at the entrance to the various mining sites at Oranjemund where her work is monitored around-the-clock.
After a high-level security clearance, visitors can only then access her office in a highly restricted area where the corridors sport security cameras that zoom in on them and are monitored by eagle-eyed guards.
Visitors have to pass through doors with x-rays that enable the guards to see through clothes and strip visitors to the bone. The cameras can, with amazing accuracy, pinpoint the minutest of solid matter either swallowed or hidden in whichever manner. But to her, this is a daily routine and simply put, she has a job to do.
She is among a new breed of workers systematically being brought onboard to work in the still male-dominated diamond mining industry where there now seems a gradual shift in power with women gradually positioned from the periphery to the centre of operations.
At her workstation there is a group of four women and a single man involved in all aspects of mineralogy, a field that is important as they quantify the amount of deposits on the different sites earmarked by the offshore diamond giant for its future marine operations.
Araes says since June 2003, she has been employed as a technician in the Geo Lab Section of the Mineral Resources Department at Oranjemund where her team’s job entails processing hundreds of samples from various mining sites to quantify their diamond content.
Born in the copper town of Tsumeb, Araes, 27, is the eldest of five children. Her father, Isak Nekongo, worked at the mine. Inge, her mother was a shop manager. At school, Araes was top of her class in Mathematics and Science. After she completed her secondary school, her potential was spotted by De Beers Marine Namibia.
Initially, she was sent to Kimberly to learn about “old and new breakages” and eventually she went to Stellenbosch University in South Africa where she took a certificate course in mineralogy. She possesses a marketing diploma and in this age where computer literacy is a must-have for any prospective employee, she also undertook a course in computing.
“My job is sampling. You work hand in hand with the geologist. The geologist sends us a grade sample to enable us to see whether that particular sample contains diamonds,” she replied to a question on what the routine of a mineralogical technician entailed.
“We have got an oven where the wet samples are dried. After they are dried, the samples are sorted into various sizes and the dust is removed on a sorting table,” she explained.
An x-ray machine helps the group to separate diamond concentrate from ‘tailings’. After the first sorting the material is subjected to a second sorting where the diamonds similarly to the first process are again put in a separate bin to that of the tailings, and thereafter the gems are weighed.
After this process, the group compiles a report from its findings on the samples they send to the geologist who now makes a final analysis on whether the site from where these samples were scooped can be “mined for diamonds on a big scale”. Her team works on samples sent from Elizabeth Bay Mine and from the pocket beaches south of L???_?_’???_?’???_?