Project Phongsali: We push on to clear the village schoolyard. We’ll resolve the issue of what to do with UXO if and when we find some.

Before we could clear the land adjacent to the school teachers had to cut all the brush that covered the parcel. Then, our team had to move the brush piles to look for UXO underneath.

Day 51

We spent all of Saturday and Sunday clearing the schoolyard, taking advantage of the students being gone for the weekend.  It was slow going, but the fellows stuck with it.  With the sun beating down on them and the ground as hard as cement, the work was a grind.  And boring!  Hour after hour the guys chipped away at the soil, following every telltale signal from the detector, but they found only nails, bottle caps, strands of wire, and mostly fragments of old bombs.

We don’t need to find UXO on the grounds to make our effort worthwhile.  With the schoolyard uncleared, the village can’t safely install a toilet, dig a well, plant a tree, install a drainage ditch, or make any other school improvement project without fear of accident.  Once we’ve covered every square inch of the grounds with our detectors and removed every tiny metal object that triggers a signal, we’ll certify the site as clear, and henceforth the village can do what they want on the site.  Our mission is about removing ordnance, but ultimately it’s about allowing people to live free of fear.

Since we finished less than half the school grounds this weekend, we’ll either have to work around students during the coming week or make a big push to finish the job next weekend.  We absolutely can’t leave town with this job unfinished, but we only have two weeks left here, and every day new people come to lead us to ordnance out in the fields and forest.

In conceptualizing this project, I never worked out a plan for what we’ll do if we still have tasks on our work list when time and money both run out.  I remember a time when I was trying to close down a different project:  we had our truck all packed to go, we’d said our goodbyes, and then a local schoolteacher breathlessly arrived to report UXO in the dirt floor of her classroom.  We had to delay our departure for several hours to tackle her problem.  At that time I thought, “Will I ever be able to just turn out the lights, lock the door, and leave?”