TWO MINING LANDS

Eleven months ago, like people all over the world, I sat in front of my television and held my breath as the Chilean miners were rescued.  Today I held my breath again as events unfolded in a mining community in my own country but sadly the outcome was not the one we all hoped for and four Welsh miners died at the Gleision Mine in the Swansea Valley.  You can read the background to the story on my friend Jan's blog.

When you are an emigrant and tragedy strikes in your homeland, it affects you in a very deep way which I cannot quite explain:  perhaps it is because part of you is, and always will be, still there and also because you are so familiar with the place and its people that you instinctively know how they will react. 

Then there are the memories:  Wales, of course, is no stranger to mining disasters and I had a grandfather who had been a miner and told me many stories of these.  The Aberfan disaster of 1966 - caused by deposits of mining debris and doubly cruel because most of the victims were children - changed my life and caused me to question the existence of a loving God at a time when doubts had already surfaced in my mind because of my reading of the French existentialists.

Whether the loss of life be large or small, a tragedy is still a tragedy for those involved and tonight my heart goes out to the families and friends of those who have died.

I do not think it is a coincidence that I have come to live in another land of tight-knit communities where there is a history of mining, in this case, for sulphur.  Many children were forced to work in appalling conditions in  Sicily's sulphur mines in the nineteenth century and the word caruso, a dialect term for "boy",  came to signify a male under fifteen years of age who did this kind of work.

Memories are long in Sicily and the people of South Wales may be sure that the thoughts of Sicilians, like the thoughts of this "Welsh-Sicilian", are with them tonight.

Ar Hyd y Nos - All Through the Night [Welsh folk song]