The Man With Gangrene: A True Story of Blood, Stones, and Survival

The night he walked into the store, the air hung thick like something rotting just beneath the skin of the city. Miami in summer doesn’t breathe—it sticks. The white lights overhead pretended to be stars, strung across the open-air walkways of The Falls like a mall designer’s idea of romance.

I was in my early twenties. Working alone. The Sunglass Hut was a shoebox with walls of glass and not much else. I kept the door open to keep from suffocating.

A humid Miami night at an open-air mall—vacant, lit by sterile overhead lights. The kind of place where shadows linger longer than people, and stories pass through unnoticed.

He came in limping.

One leg wrapped in bandages.

Crutches under each arm.

And a face that looked like it had been carved with a hunting knife—weathered, harsh, tired in a way that didn’t come from age.

When he spoke, I heard the rough, clipped roll of Afrikaans. The kind of accent that smells of veld dust and diesel and war stories.

“Jislaaik, dis warm hier,” he muttered. Jesus, it’s hot in here.

We talked for three hours.

His name—Pieter van der Merwe, though I doubt that was the name he used when crossing borders.

He was recovering from gangrene, he said, from a cut he got deep in the forest somewhere near the Congolese border. A thorn, maybe. Maybe a machete slip. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he almost lost the leg, and still, he wasn’t done.

He was on his way to the Amazon.

Another job. Another vein to tap.

He didn’t use the word “smuggling.”

He didn’t have to.

He talked about diamonds the way soldiers talk about killing. Like it was just part of the job.

He spoke of extraction like it was noble. Dirty, yes—but noble. Something men did. Something hard. Something that gave meaning to a life already too far gone to be anything else.

“Dis ‘n vuil spel,” he said. It’s a dirty game.“Maar dis beter as stil doodgaan.” But it’s better than dying quietly.

He talked about bribing border guards with whiskey and rifles. About backdoor flights through Gabon, Angola, Brazil. About sleeping with a gun under your ribs and waking up to ants in your boots. He talked about stones like they were currency, not beauty—about how people will kill for color, for weight, for shimmer.

And the entire time, my stomach twisted, because I wasn’t just horrified.

I was enthralled.

I didn’t grow up thinking diamonds were evil. I grew up like most girls—believing they meant something permanent. Something special.

But after I got back from Tanzania—my first time in Africa—everything changed.

Tanzanite and diamonds, echoing the colonial legacy still etched into every facet.

That was when the news broke: a mine collapse near Mererani, in the hills where Tanzanite comes from. A blast went wrong. Forty-two men never came home. Trapped underground, choked by the earth they were trying to hollow out.

And I had just walked those dusty red dirt roads. Just seen the sky that shade of blue. Just bought a stone to wear on my finger because I thought it meant I had carried some small piece of that land with me.

But Tanzanite doesn’t come without blood.

And neither does gold. Or emerald. Or sapphire.

Or whatever Pieter was chasing.

The thing no one tells you is that the Earth remembers every cut.

Central Africa is bleeding under fake permits and armed “security.” The Congo Basin is a corpse being picked over by states and syndicates.

The Amazon is carved open with mercury and fire, rivers turned into poison trails, Indigenous children coughing up metal in their sleep.

They call it artisanal mining when they want it to sound quaint.

They call it natural resources when they want to hide the human cost.

But I’ve seen it.

I’ve heard it.

And I met a man once who had gangrene in his leg and diamonds in his conscience, and he told me—

“The jungle gives you riches if you don’t mind giving it your soul.”

I think about him sometimes.

That man with the bandaged leg and the half-rotted conscience.

I wonder if he made it to the Amazon, or if the jungle finally claimed what it was owed.

I wonder if some kid in Cape Town or Kansas is wearing a stone pulled from his last job, saying “it’s rare, it’s beautiful, it’s forever.”

I wonder if the Earth remembers each cut—because I do.

There is no such thing as an ethical stone.

Not when the Earth is gutted and dressed up for sale.

Not when the system still worships sparkle over soil.

Not when ghost towns are buried in the mines beneath your jewelry.

Not when the planet dies politely so you can wear something “natural.”

Not when the violence just wears a cleaner suit.

So no, I don’t believe in precious things anymore.

Because I met the man who took the Earth apart with his own hands.

And he limped into my life like a warning

I still haven’t stopped hearing.