Villagers risk their lives harvesting scrap.
Eight out of every ten people in Laos survive day to day consuming the products of their most recent harvest. Villagers grow enough for this year’s needs, but have nothing to store in anticipation of future problems. Their labor produces just enough food for survival, but little surplus to sell to others. Because they consume all they produce, villagers have few opportunities to earn cash for the purchase of goods that they cannot grow or fashion for themselves.
To supplement their diet and to obtain necessities, villagers in Khammuan Province also hunt, fish, and forage. They scavenge throughout the countryside for edible plants, herbal medicines, minerals, construction materials, firewood, and other products. In the early morning hours, if you stand along a trail leading out of a Lao village, nearly every man, woman, or child who is heading to work in the forest or fields will be carrying a basket containing nothing more than a little rice and a few simple tools.
If you position yourself along the trail as darkness nears, you can greet the same villagers as they return home. This time of day, their baskets will be brimming. The villagers will have gathered wild plants for their family and forage for their livestock. Sometimes the baskets contain birds, rodents, and other small game that the villagers have snared or shot. Currently it’s the rainy season, and mushrooms are bountiful on the moist forest floor. People are gathering them to eat fresh or to dry for storage. No hands come home empty. If villagers have not found food or any other useful item, they will probably be toting firewood.
However, things have changed since I first visited Laos six years ago. Now what I often see a villager carrying home is the product of a dangerous and sometimes deadly harvest: scrap metal — mostly bomb fragments from old ordnance, but occasionally entire bombs, mortars, and rockets.
For more than forty years, Lao villagers have collected war refuse for their own purposes. Villagers use old bomb casings as planters, feed troughs, or fence posts. They fashion small casings and shells into lamps, cowbells, or household utensils. Nearly every blacksmith’s forge in this part of Laos sits next to a pile of bomb fragments that villagers hammer into knives, hoes, shovels, and other tools.
What has happened recently, with the improvement of road connections between Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, is a dramatic increase in the amount of scrap that is collected from local villages and sold to distant foundries. I was in Laos in the summer of 2003 when a new highway was being constructed to link central Laos with Viet Nam. The road was not yet complete and was barely passable. Still, scrap dealers were entering Laos on the new road, fanning out across the countryside, and pitching to impoverished villagers a way to make easy money.
Vietnamese scrap dealers arrived in pickup trucks loaded with cheap metal detectors that they sold on easy credit. The condition of the sale required the buyers to pay off their debt in scrap. For the equivalent of $26, a villager had a detector in his hands and could start searching for long-buried refuse. At six cents a pound, a villager needed to deliver more than 400 pounds of scrap to pay for the detector; but once the debt was paid, a family could start realizing a profit, especially if every relative joined in and kept the detector moving all day, every day. For some villages, collecting scrap became the community’s largest single source of cash. For many children, it became both a job and a pastime.
In a village here in Khammuan Province, I crossed paths with a father-and-son team. The boy, seven or eight years old, worked the detector while his father dug the holes. I watched nervously as the man used a heavy steel hoe to quickly open a wide hole and dig out whatever object had triggered his son’s detector. Thankfully, when his hoe finally clanked against metal, the buried object turned out to be a large shard from a casing and not a bomb. I didn’t hang around long; any accident that occurred would probably wound father, son and bystanders equally since the concept of “safety distance” was unknown to them. (Our clearance workers are directed to stay at least 10 meters away from any other worker, to minimize the chance that an explosion will injure several people.)
I bought a detector myself — not for use here, but as an addition to the UXO awareness display that my wife and I take from school to school in America. It’s a crude device, but sufficient for the operator to locate metal objects within the first half meter of the soil. Since village scrap collectors want large items, they don’t care if the device fails to indicate nails, bolts, bullets, and other small objects.
A few weeks ago as our Response Team walked through a rice field, a woman approached us. Tearfully, she encouraged us to keep working and to remove every piece of UXO from the gardens. She had good reason to be concerned. She and her daughters work daily in the fields, and it was her granddaughter who was leading us to a site where cluster bombs had been found. The woman’s nine-year-old son had been drawn to the scrap trade as one of the only ways he could earn money for himself and his family. Unfortunately, the boy and two of his friends were killed a year ago when they clicked together a couple of bomblets, probably to knock them free of dirt so they could see what they had found.
“If you find UXO, take it away,” she commanded in Lao. “Pull it out. It’s awful!” Then she pointed to a spot across the field and described her family’s tragedy.
“Over there, people who find bombs pile them in a mound. You can go look where the boys hit the bombies. The children went to the field and took a metal detector to search for steel and aluminum. The little boys had seen the scrap and they decided to collect it to sell and make money”.
“Two boys took bombies and struck them together. My son was standing nearby watching. My son got hit in the belly and the leg. The other parts of his body were not injured. The friends who hit the bombs together both died on the spot. Our son was taken to the Nakai hospital first, and then to Yommalat. At both hospitals they asked for oxygen and blood, but there was none.”
She paused and looked at her two daughters. “Children are around,” she said softly. “We can’t always see what children are doing.”
The Response Team that I work with has built a positive relationship with some of the local scrap dealers who function in the middle of the trade; the entrepreneurs who buy scrap from locals, hold it at a collection center, and then resell it to agents of foundries in Laos, Thailand, and Viet Nam. Often these local dealers will buy a bag of scrap only to discover later that it contains live ordnance, mistakenly picked up by villagers.
We make weekly visits to the scrap yards and remove bombies, rockets, shells, and other dangerous items that accumulate there. I’ve learned through experience never to upend a bag of scrap and empty its contents onto the ground; it’s disconcerting to have live ordnance land at your feet. While it may appear that we are facilitating the scrap trade, the reality is that when accidents occur in scrap yards, the exploding bomb is an indiscriminate killer. The scrap dealer may pay the price of his dangerous trade, but neighbors and passersby are often killed or maimed as well. We hope that by keeping the scrap yards safe, we are protecting the lives of children and other innocents nearby. We also believe that factual information shared with the scrap dealers will eventually find its way to collectors in the villages.
Misinformation abounds among scrap dealers and villagers about which objects can be touched safely. Often people who have handled live ordnance and lived to tell the tale falsely assume that they can repeat the same procedure with similar objects. They confuse their good luck with skill.
Not all scrap dealers trust us. Last week, following up on a confidential tip, we found a large bomb casing behind a shop. It lay in a blackened field indicating recent grass fires or the burning of rubbish. The shop owner, new to the scrap trade, had purchased the casing from a confident villager who vouched for its safety. Some daring amateurs had chiseled off the bomb’s back fuse and scooped out the hundreds of pounds of explosives that the casing contained; they bet their lives, won, and made the equivalent of twenty dollars’ profit. (The consensus among the professionals that I work with is that those bold villagers are lucky to be alive, and that they won’t see old age if they repeat the same technique with other bombs!)
In any event, the amateurs didn’t know enough about the design of this particular bomb to finish the job properly. Unknown to them, inside the casing is a booster whose function is to intensify the bomb’s explosion. That device, if detonated within the empty casing, would blast the bomb’s front fuse off like a rocket. The booster’s blast would jet out the back of the bomb like a giant blow torch. While the bomb’s casing would not fragment and send shrapnel flying, the booster’s blast alone could kill or inflict serious injury. One of our technical advisors witnessed just such an incident a few years back involving a similar bomb. The rocketing front fuse smacked into a bystander, fortunately only breaking his leg. The blast of smoke and flame hit another onlooker in the face, temporarily blinding him.
It took some persuasion to convince the bomb’s owner that it was best for us to take it to a safe location, destroy the booster, and render the casing truly safe. We needed seven men to load the huge bomb into our largest truck. It now sits in a distant field where we can safely destroy the hidden booster. Once the demolition is complete, we’ll go to the trouble of hauling the casing back to its skeptical owner. He’ll have his investment back; we hope we will have his trust in future encounters. The best ending will be if he gets word to the villagers who sold him the casing and they learn greater respect for the complexity of big bombs.
One of the frustrations of our work is that we have little success in persuading villagers to stop participating in this dangerous trade. Villagers are too poor, and other opportunities are too scarce. People who have not traveled in this part of the world might well ask, “What could children want that would be worth the risks they take?”
All I can reply is that wants and needs here are different from those in America or Europe. Children in Khammuan Province aren’t digging scrap with visions of bikes, CD players or personal computers in their heads. In most cases what they would like is a second shirt and the possibility of a third meal each day.