Rockefeller didn't start out this way

Charlie Campbell has a Time article about oil-drilling in Burma:

Waist-deep in pits of crude oil, longyi-clad roughnecks burrow a living from black gold in the most improbable of landscapes. Ko Min, 26, manually extracts the viscous liquid from his three three-hundred-foot-deep wells (photo) in Minhla township in the Magwe district, where a forest of tents cover small-scale mining operations in this bleak corner of west-central Burma, officially known as Myanmar.
British colonizers first discovered oil here in the nineteenth century but, after the wells were abandoned, resourceful locals moved in to reap the glistening rewards. While some claim to have become millionaires from their labors, Ko Min still has a long way to go. Nevertheless, the thirty dollars he makes on average each day goes a long way in a country where an estimated quarter of the fifty-million population subsist on less than a dollar a day.
Sandwiched between India and Thailand, this Southeast Asia nation boasts abundant natural resources that lie largely untapped, a corollary of Western economic sanctions brought in to shackle the brutal military dictatorship that ruled for half a century. But since a quasi-democratic government was elected in 2010, albeit staffed by familiar faces from the former junta regime, the floodgates have opened and energy giants such as BP and Shell descended on Rangoon, the largest city, to sniff out investment opportunities.
In August of 2013, Thai state-owned firm PTT Exploration & Production successfully unearthed gas in the Bay of Bengal off Burma’s western coast. And, just last month, the Shwe gas pipeline, carrying oil and gas more than sixteen hundred miles from western Burma to southwest China, began flowing.
But despite the arrival of the booming multinationals, opportunities remain for individuals like Ko Min, who bought rights to use his wells for around a thousand dollars from the farmer who owns the land. Although lucrative, the techniques used— buckets, hand-pulleys, brute force— are primitive and dangerous.
Sinewy men winch containers from the dank earth, fill barrels with buckets, and then roll them onto trucks to be transported to small-scale refineries. Labor here is not for the faint-hearted; accidents are common. Nevertheless, in a country where the slightest opportunity cannot be squandered, business is booming.

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