Parents lose two sons in separate accidents.

Ban Mai - Boualapha District - Khammuan Province - Lao Peoples Democratic Republic

When I sat down to talk with the family in Ban Mai about the death of their son the week before, I was mentally prepared for the conversation to go in one of two directions.

One possibility was that the family would express regret that their son collected scrap.  They might well express guilt over giving him permission, or perhaps encouragement, to risk his life.  They might harbor hostility toward local scrap dealers who lure children into the trade and then exploit them in terms of food, transport, wages and working conditions.  And, if their worldview extended beyond their simple village, I might hear them vent anger toward other parties distant in both time and place.

Starting with the pilot of the American plane who dropped bombs on their village nearly forty years ago, and ending with the owner of the Lao or Vietnamese foundry that voraciously consumes fragments of those bombs today, I could imagine a long list of people who the parents might hold responsible for their child’s death.

I thought of my friend Khamphong whose nine-year-old son was killed four years ago while collecting scrap.  After the accident his anger raged and he struggled to find a focus.  In the hours after his son died  Khamphong walked through Thalang Village, confronted every family who possessed a metal detector, and demanded that they turn the device over to him.  Before he went to bed that night Khamphong had eleven detectors in hand that he intended to destroy.

But, I also considered a second direction my conversation with the grieving family might take.  They might justify the trade and their participation in it.  Perhaps the parents would describe the living conditions that drove them to place their children in harm’s way and tell me they had no other choice.  I hoped they wouldn’t seek my agreement with their decision.

I’m sympathetic toward the Lao people, so many of whom live in the simplest of homes, own little clothing or other personal possessions, and struggle to put two meager meals a day on the table. But, when it comes to handing a child a detector, a bag, and a shovel and aiming them in the direction of a bomb crater, I have a decidedly closed mind.

The mother and father that we interviewed were the parents of a teenager who mishandled the “booster” from a large bomb and paid with his life.  That youth and four of his friends discovered the device while excavating a bomb casing and mistook it for a piece of electronic communications equipment.  When the booster exploded the boy died along with his fifteen-year-old cousin. (I detailed the events of that accident in my journal entry for August 28, 2008.)

After we introduced ourselves as UXO clearance workers, the family invited us into their home which, in the fashion of all Lao Loum houses in this part of the country, sits on stilts eight feet off the ground.  We left our shoes below and in our stocking feet climbed a ladder leading to the doorway of the house.  Once inside, Yai and I sat cross-legged on one side of a large woven plastic mat that the mother unrolled to cover the rough-hewn floorboards.  The family, consisting of husband, wife, and several children, lined the remaining three sides.

I asked the parents how many children they had.  The mother smiled and proudly announced that she had eleven children: ten boys and a girl.  Before I could ask if “ten boys” included the son who had just been killed, she corrected herself; she said she now had eight sons and a daughter.

The mother briefly explained the loss of her two sons.  I was startled to learn that not one, but two of her boys had been killed by exploding ordnance.  In addition to the teen killed the week before, another son was killed by a cluster bomb a couple of years back.  Immediately, we were into the topic I came to discuss.

After reviewing the nature of the accident, I asked the parents, “What will your family do next?  Will you ever again permit your children to dig for scrap?”

The mother quickly responded, “Oh yes.  And me, too.  I am going to look for scrap because we don’t have enough to eat”.  Nodding in her husband’s direction, she said, “Father too.  All of us will look for scrap.”

Then, she pointed to several sons sitting at her side, ranging in age from perhaps eight years to twenty.  She continued, “I won’t tell them to stop.  I’ll tell them to look for scrap, but to be careful.”

As the mother spoke her husband frequently nodded in agreement.  They clearly shared a common resolve.  So…I directed my next question to the eldest son, a UXO deminer with the largest humanitarian clearance organization in the country: the family member who carried his brother’s shattered body home after the accident.

“Two of your brothers have already died collecting scrap.  Do you think your other brothers should ever collect again?”

Without hesitation the young man replied, “I don’t tell them to stop because we are not a rich family and I do not have enough money to feed them all.  I only tell them, don’t touch UXO.”

I then asked the family, “Since the accident, have any of you gone looking for scrap?”  Again, it was the mother who spoke first.

“No, we have not gone looking for scrap.  Because we haven’t had a detector.  Our detector was broken in the accident that killed my son and we had to throw it away.”  She then sent her youngest son into a darkened room to retrieve a detector that the family just that day borrowed from friends.  When the boy returned she confidently set the detector before us.  Now, she indicated, the family was again equipped to search.

Increasingly, I found myself in a dialog with the mother.  She was frank, forceful and, I suspected, the prime mover and ultimate decision-maker for the family.

“Don’t you have any other way to make money or obtain food?” I asked.

The mother threw my question back at me.  “How? We work in the rice field and the crop dies.  The sun gets too hot for the rice or the winds break the stems.  Every year is like that.”

Yai leaned over and whispered to me, “I have always heard that this part of Laos has the worst winds.  It blows everything over at harvest time.”

“We had buffalos and cows”, the mother continued.  “We fed them for two or three years and then they died.  We have no jobs here.  There are no factories here” She then quoted a Lao proverb that describes their hand-to-mouth existence:  “Search for food in the morning; eat breakfast.  Search in the night; eat dinner.”

“Is everyone in this village in the same situation?” I asked.  “Yes, yes” the mother replied.  “My child is not the only one to search and die”.

Pointing to a house across the way she said, “From that house over there, someone died from UXO.  From this village, already this year two or three have died.  And not just this year.  In recent years we have had ten or more die.”

Clearly, our conversation was following one of the two courses that I had anticipated.  The parents were articulating a compelling justification for their children’s participation in the trade.  Their view, unequivocally, was that their sons had died while helping provide their family with the necessities of life.

But I slowly became aware of a profound disconnect between the parents’ declaration of poverty and the material possessions that I saw in and around their home.

While listening to the mother speak, I rested my video camera on an upraised knee, casually framing her face in the viewfinder.  My recorder was running, not necessarily to capture visual images but to insure that I returned home with an audio recording that Yai and I could review.

As the mother talked about her family’s poverty and the need for her children to search and dig, I suddenly realized that she and her husband were sitting in front of a stack of audio speakers. (The oversized kind that the Lao use during celebrations to blast music and create a festive atmosphere).

As the mother continued, I let my eyes explore other parts of the home.  Behind the row of sons seated along the mat, I spotted a large television set.  Next to it was a tape deck and a DVD player.  Across the room was a large wardrobe similar to those I’ve seen in more affluent homes, the kind of ornate piece that upwardly mobile Lao favor when they move from strictly functional furniture to more expensive pieces.

I then mentally connected the image of the television and other electronic devices with the array of motorcycles that I saw parked beneath the house when we arrived.  The evidence clearly indicated that, while this family had no doubt known abject poverty in the past, the scrap trade was now providing them with more than just the necessities of life. This family had discretionary income and was purchasing consumer goods that most rural Lao can only dream about.

As I concluded Part 2 of this series of journal entries I wrote that I found my visit with this family unsettling and that I needed additional time to reflect on the experience before commenting.

At the time, I was fearful that if I disclosed this family’s upwardly mobile status, readers might inaccurately conclude that a majority of villagers in Ban Mai have achieved economic security and that the villagers now risk their lives not for food, but for televisions and motorbikes.

My observations in Boualapha and neighboring districts permit me to say unequivocally that most collectors are excavating scrap to meet the necessities of life and not for discretionary spending on, what, in Lao at least, are luxury items.

I also questioned my impulse to impose my personal values on this family.  I asked myself, “What right do I have to define “necessities of life” for them?”  If digging scrap for food is acceptable, what about digging scrap for medicine?  How about clothing? Shoes? A bicycle? A fan? A water filter? What right do I have sort their possessions and say some are essential and others are not?

I reminded myself of the nineteenth-century American textile workers who audaciously (for the age) announced that they wanted not just wages sufficient to keep themselves alive, but wages that would permit them to enjoy their lives.  To adapt their famous rallying cry, don’t the Lao have a right to “rice and roses too”?

I’m glad I took the extra time to ponder these issues.  In the end, after much reflection, my mind is settled.  I came to a conclusion that I hold with sufficient conviction that I’ll post it here and invite readers to consider:

I’ve seen the gore that exploding ordnance will create.  I have friends here who represent just about every consequence of an accident: Bountha is blind.  Singin has just one leg.  Thongbay lost a hand.  Ta lost both arms.  Noy’s face is disfigured with scars from burns.  Hamm, Lone, Kao are dead and buried.

It’s wrong for this mother to offer her children up to the scrap trade.  She, her husband, and her adult children have enough education and life experience to weigh the risks against the possible rewards.  As adults they possess the intellectual maturity to understand the rudiments of ordnance technology and to formulate a plan to minimize the chance of an accident. Their children do not.

Loosing not one, but two children to exploding ordnance should be sufficient evidence for any parent to conclude that there is no way to work with ordnance in complete safety. It is no more justified for parents to send their children out to dig scrap than it is to sell them into prostitution or slavery.

Furthermore, it should not be necessary for those of us who work here to argue against child endangerment one family at a time and then hope for voluntary compliance.  What’s needed is clear and unequivocal legislation that forbids child participation, followed by effective police enforcement of the law.