An Amnesty International researcher visited a mine in the Carnot region in May 2015. Children as young as 11 were engaged in mining work instead of attending school. Miners were digging deep into the earth, with no equipment to shore up the pit walls to prevent collapse. They were camping in very tough conditions on site, both to avoid spending time travelling back and forth to their village, and to protect the mine from being looted or taken over. Although they expressed confidence that this site would yield diamonds, they pointed to a nearby site where they had worked for some time, saying that their efforts there had been entirely unsuccessful.