Project Sekong 2012: Meet our team. “Kik” proves women just as capable as men when working with bombs and landmines.

Kik, the youngest member of our team, sends her pay home every month to help her widowed mother and siblings. She gets homesick for her village in the Bolavens but knows that her job working with UXO will help her entire family achieve a higher quality of life.

Report 29

Kik took some ribbing last year for being the youngest member of our team but, in truth, if she hadn’t admitted to being just seventeen we wouldn’t have guessed that she was so young.

In Laos girls start taking responsibility for tasks around the home at an early age.  It’s common to see female children, only four or five years old, bathing, feeding, nurturing, younger siblings.  By age eight or nine girls have learned to build cook fires and prepare entire meals on their own.  By her teen years, a young woman has learned to do all of the tasks that her mother contributes to the family’s well being, which is to say most of the work.

This year, Kik is again is the youngest member of our team — seven years younger than the next youngest staff.  But we no longer consider her a novice.  She’s worked on several clearance projects over the past year and has honed her demining skills.  In fact, she’s become an excellent mentor for Pang Xi, our other female deminer.

Kik is from the Bolaven Plateau, the premier coffee region of Laos. Kik’s family maintains a small grove of coffee trees, less than two acres, but their modest harvest is their only source of cash income.  Their entire crop goes to a factory that processes the beans into a variety of products such as foil-packed instant coffee and canned coffee-flavored beverages. Ironically, Kik doesn’t much care for fresh brewed coffee; she drinks what the Lao call “three in one”, a commercial product that combines instant coffee, artificial creamer and sugar — to my mind a trade of money, health and flavor for convenience.

Our deminers work in every kind of weather, often in unique locations. Here, Kik searches for UXO that rains have washed into a stream bed.

Kik’s father died in a motorcycle accident when she was just five, leaving her mother to raise six children alone.  While work takes Kik far from her family for months at a time she continues to send her pay home to help meet family expenses.

Although Kik misses her family and friends in the Bolavens, she plans to continue working with UXO as long as she can find employment.  There are few jobs around her village that pay at all, and none that pay as well as demining.  She sees little future in farm work — only a hand to mouth existence with no opportunity to acquire consumer goods, to pay for an education, or to build a cash reserve to see her family through difficult times.

Kik’s mother worries about her daughter working with ordnance, but consoles herself with the thought that hundreds of men and women in Laos do the same work, mostly without incident. She trusts in her daughter’s training and the reputation of the company that employs her.