By Alameen Templeton
Cassie Meyer calls them "bumps", the marrow-freezing tremors that periodically shake the earth around Stilfontein's Hartebeestfontein mine.
They happen every two to three days and each jolt ties a knot in her stomach, although she has been a miner's wife for eight years.
Being married to the trade, she knows that the tremors signal a shift in a few tons of rock deep below the earth's surface. She also knows that the possibility exists that someone, including her husband Lee, 55, could be trapped beneath the debris.
Each time it happens, Meyer finds herself on the telephone trying to establish the details.
It's no easy task because South Africa's mines are notorious for keeping a lid on accidents on their property. Hartebeestfontein is no exception.
So, instead of getting information from management, she finds herself calling the wives of other miners, hoping that one of them may have heard a tit bit, a vital inkling as to what has happened in the pit where their husbands go to work every day.
Within minutes of a tremor shaking the small town about 200km south of Johannesburg, telephones are ringing in the houses as fear feeds on fear, rumour upon rumour, with a rising sense of panic in the face of blunt management refusals to give out any information.
Meyer says management's demand for secrecy in times of crisis borders on paranoia.
She believes it's a symptom of a bigger cause: senior managers' reluctance to admit the deep personal traumas and social damage their boardroom decisions are having on the tightly knit mining
community.
She says it's time Hartebeestfontein acknowledged its wider debt.
"Management doesn't want to talk to us, they never talk to the wives. It's like we don't exist.
"They think we are servants, but we aren't. They need to start talking to the wives because we are the ones who keep the home fires burning, especially in times of crisis.
"We are the invisible workers on the mine. We are a very important factor in making a mine work.
"We feed the men, we wash their clothes and we talk to them about their fears and frustrations so that they can go back to work every day," she says.
The past week's quake measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale signalled a seismic shift in the fears that plague her every day. It was no ordinary tremor.
Meyer and her friend, Marie Oerder - a counsellor for Lifeline - were at a local restaurant when the big one struck just after noon.
"We felt the whole building shake, but it was different from the past bumps. The ground started shaking like the quake was right underneath us. Marie's glass shattered, but mine didn't. At the shop opposite, everything was thrown off the shelves.
"Marie and I just froze and stared at each other for a while. Then we jumped into action."
The first place Meyer made for was the mine. She wanted to know if her husband was safe. Of course, the production manager said nothing was wrong.
The distraught woman headed for home where she met her husband who had come off work just as the quake began. Once she was sure he was fine, she turned her attention to the neighbourhood. Everywhere, there were signs of the quake's massive power.
Within metres of savage destruction, fragile objects like plate glass windows and slender frames stood unscathed next to entire brick walls that had tumbled to the ground.
In a block of flats opposite the fire station, some flats were reduced to rubble while others directly below showed no signs of damage.
In some rooms, everything above the floor was thrown onto the ground while, just metres away, it seemed as if nothing had happened.
As dazed Stilfontein residents started taking stock of the damage, the nearby Harties mine was in a frenzy. Almost the entire day shift - 3 200 miners - were underground, queueing to climb into cages that would take them to the surface when the first big one hit.
The first priority was to take roll call to establish who was missing and then to get the miners to the surface.
Four lesser aftershocks followed in the next 15 minutes. They would continue throughout the day while rescuers tried to find the 40 miners who were cut off from escape routes by fallen ground. Two of them were killed almost immediately.
Getting all the miners out was a slow process, particularly at 5 Shaft, where the headgear had been knocked out of commission as it stood almost directly above the quake epicentre.
It took a long time before miners were reconnected to their spouses and a lot of worrying hours passed before everyone knew who was missing and who had made it back.
Mining is a hard business. It takes a special kind of person who has the willingness to go down, day after day, into the bowels of the Earth. The seam of gold, the reef, is actually an ancient river bed that aeons ago fed a huge inland lake.
Millions of years and significant shifts in the Earth's surface broke up the lake and river beds, burying parts kilometres below the surface. At depths of up to three kilometres, the rock takes on special properties.
For every kilometre below the surface, the temperature rises 11°C. At 2,4km where the 40 men were trapped, the virgin rock is more than 50°C.
So great is the pressure on the surface of the tunnels that have been carved into the rock that the face quietly spits pieces of stone onto the ground nearby.
When the pressures get too great or fractures caused by drilling take their toll, tons of rock can spontaneously burst, crushing anyone nearby.
Last week, as the the miners' rescuers burrowed through to them, Meyer was getting her own show on the road.
She is a member of Women in Dialogue, an organisation formed by South Africa's first lady, Zaneli Mbeki, and Brigalia Bam, aimed at facilitating reconciliation by bringing together women of different races.
The rationale behind the group's dynamics is that women share many of the same problems, despite their different backgrounds.
In Stilfontein, the group is headed by Maggie Nkwe, who mustered their forces to arrange blankets and food for those left homeless by the quake.
Within minutes of the temblor, they had pledges for provisions pouring in.
Meyer was threatening to organise a march against the mine if it didn't make available some of its empty mine houses for those left without a roof over their heads.
Like many people in the town, Meyer suspects the quakes are caused by mining operations.
The mine has dismissed such suggestions, although insurers who have been left out of pocket by the past week's tremors are reportedly investigating the causes of the regular "seismic events", as they are called by the mining trade.
Meyer has seen many of the side-effects of mining: she helps with counselling for miners infected with HIV; her friends work for Lifeline and she is familiar with tales of alcoholism, wife beating and violence that often characterise the hard-drinking, hard-living mining lifestyle.
She knows the pressures. She sees her husband for about 30 minutes to an hour twice a day.
He works shifts and so he never has a regular sleeping pattern. It is unavoidable that this eats into Meyer's routine and she admits she battles to keep track or control of her life.
One week, her husband is getting up at 4.30am to go to work; the next, he's up at 9pm; then 4pm the week after that. There's no regularity and the family suffers.
"He works seven days a week. From time to time, they get a day of rest, which is often cancelled. So our week consists of different hours and we don't see each other," she says.
Piling stress upon fear upon uncertainty are the perennial rumours that do the rounds during this season - wage negotiation time.
Much like a kidnapper putting a gun to his own head and threatening to pull the trigger, management's biggest tool to obtain worker wage acquiescence is to whisper the word "closure".
Harties' production in the last financial year was 40 percent down on the previous period. The mine has applied for a closure certificate and the small town of Stilfontein is in a spin.
Now rumours, denied by management, are doing the rounds that the costs of the quake could shut down the mine.
That spells disaster for the town. Everyone feeds off the mine, whether or not they are employed by the operation or if they just sell services and goods to the miners. Harties generates the lifeblood that is the only rationale for the town's existence in the middle of nowhere.
Oerder says the pressures and stresses are taking their toll. Domestic violence is up, alcoholism is up, unemployment is up. Only wages, miners and cages are down - deep, deep down.
She says it's time Harties lived up to its name and started talking to the women of the town because the healing is long overdue.