Project Phongsali 2011: Our team, now at full strength, follows villagers to ordnance.

People often ask how our team finds ordnance. In truth, our "response team" seldom has to go to searching. In most villages people are eager to lead us to items that have plagued them for years.

Week Three

Day Sixteen:

Vilasak and four deminers left Vientiane two days ago and traveled up Route 13 to Luang Prabang and then on to Muang Khoua, by way of Oudomxai, retracing the route that Yai and I took two weeks ago. For them, the journey was far less comfortable than our trip. They were traveling by bus and had to spend two days and a night sitting up.

The deminers, all young women from Champasak Province, had an even longer journey; before departing Vientiane, they had already spent twenty-four hours traveling from their village to the capital. (They could have made the trip in thirteen hours had they taken the express “sleeping bus” but to save money they pieced together a series of local bus rides.)

I planned a mid-morning rendezvous in Muang Khoua so the team could enjoy a full night’s rest in a real bed before starting work. I knew that there were villages along our route back to Muang May that had UXO that people wanted the team to see.

We weren’t on the road home for but a few minutes when work started in earnest. At our first stop a man led us to a slew of bombies in his garden. He’d asked the police and the military for help but they declined, so his practice has been that as bomblets turn up, if they are in places he can’t avoid, he carries them on a shovel to the river and pitches them in. Less troublesome bombies, those that aren’t actually underfoot, he simply avoids and hopes for the best. We put his garden on our list.

In the next village a fellow wanted us to check out a bomb crater that he has been using as a depository for all the ordnance that he’s chanced upon during a lifetime of farming, hunting, fishing, hiking, and foraging. (It’s common for farmers in Laos to reserve one bomb crater on their property as a dump for all refuse of war. The dedicated site becomes well known to family and neighbors and is avoided by all.)

At our urging, the fellow flogged his memory and attempted to identify the broad range of UXO that he has dropped in his crater over the last forty years. He went on and on and on. Clearly that pit is now a Noah’s Ark of deadly ordnance: big bombs, little bombs, cluster bomblet, bullets, mortars, rockets, fuses. The crater will be a threat to life, limb, and property should a grass fire ever blaze through the area. We added his name to our list.

Back at our truck, another villager approached to ask if we were the bomb people. He asked us to inspect some ordnance that he’s worried about. Before we could head out, a motorbike slid to a stop beside us and yet another villager asked if we were the bomb people.

At that point we simply took names and cell phone numbers and promised to return in a week (on our next fuel run) to conduct a thorough search of the area