For 12 days, Jane Mucheni and dozens of other women slept on the floor under a blue tent just outside Bay Horse Mine, a disused gold mine in Chegutu, about 110km (70 miles) west of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.

The women were waiting for their sons and husbands – declared missing after the mine collapsed on September 30 – to resurface either dead or alive. Nine people had died while 22 others were rescued until the government called off the search to retrieve the trapped miners, angering grieving relatives of those still missing.