Project Phongsali 2011: We teach children: “If you don’t know what it is, don’t touch. It could be UXO.”

After we visited their school, a group of children led us to a suspicious looking object that they feared might be UXO. It turned out to be a look-alike item, but their caution confirmed that they had learned an important lesson.

Week Two

Day Fourteen:

Four village girls, each about eight years old, happened upon a rusty hunk of suspicious-looking metal.  Having seen us at their school earlier in the day they knew that we’d returned to Sop Houn and were back to deal with unexploded ordnance.  Wisely, the girls obeyed a fundamental tenet of risk education:  “If you don’t know what it is, don’t touch it”.

As usually happens, each of the girls present at the discovery invited several friends to join them in leading us to the item.  Then, other children, seeing the growing crowd and sensing adventure, joined in. Soon, we were leading a raucous children’s crusade.

When Yai and I realized that our parade was growing exponentially, we skid to a halt and barked orders.  We demanded that the twenty or thirty tag-a-long helpers hightail it in the opposite direction.  Most of the kids stood their ground, staring blankly at us, hoping they might still make the cut.  Then, Yai enlisted the help of two elderly women sitting nearby; the ladies spoke kindly, but firmly, to the children and soon had them sulking away.  Once our posse was reduced to the original four girls, we continued on to the site.

The item that the girls found is probably not unexploded ordnance.  More likely, it is a rusty glob of iron doing a pretty convincing  impersonation of a cluster bomblet.  But… considering the fact that there are 300 different kinds of ordnance found in Laos and that forty years of weathering have altered the appearance of those diverse items into an infinite array of permutations, positive identification is a task far beyond my ability.

As we returned to our truck, Yai said, “I am 99% sure that that item is safe. But I don’t want to take even a one-percent chance.  If the ‘one-percent’ explodes, you are 100% dead.”

In a couple of days, when our full team is here, we’ll ask Vilasak, our team leader, to make the final determination.