Report 31 Chan Mai Vue, the younger of our two Hmong deminers, lives in Bolikhamxai Province, in south central Laos. That’s not a region that people commonly associate with the Hmong, but there have been Hmong settlements there for generations. In fact, I made my first visit to that province on a mission to...
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Report 30 Our team is grinding along, clearing expansion garden plots, but it’s frustrating work. Early on we were fortunate to be working fields with little scrap, but now we are harvesting thousands of pieces of bomb frag every day. Metal shards by the bucketful. We’re working both sides of a steep valley that...
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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...
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Report 28 Our first task of the day was calming a lady who was shaken by the experience of nearly whacking a cluster bomblet with her machete while she was cutting back weedy growth in her family’s coffee plantation. She pulled up short when she spied the bomblet mostly hidden amongst the grass and...
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Report 27 Hill rice is grown on the steep hillsides that have had all natural vegetation removed through the age-old practice of “slash and burn” or “swidden” agriculture. The slopes are too steep to permit standing water; hill rice plants depend on sufficient rainfall during the growing season and, as a consequence, yield just...
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In recognition of International Landmine Awareness Day I am reposting a blog that I wrote back in 2006, when We Help War Victims first carried amputees to Vientiane to be fitted with artificial limbs. Our good friends at COPE (Cooperative Orthotics and Prosthetic Enterprise) assisted the victims we delivered to their door. In the...
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Report 25 Dao Vieng, our driver, is on the job every hour that our team is in the field. He’s indispensable to our project, but actually breaks a sweat far less often than any other staff. Once he delivers us to the work site, his only duty is to stand by, prepared at a...
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Report 24 Early on, we sent our first truck, a Hyundai Porter, home in shame. A Porter is a low slung, flatbed truck that’s great for hauling cargo on tame roads and, when fitted with benches, it’s good transport for a team of seven or eight. But off road, where clearance is important and...
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Report 23 A couple of our deminers did a poor job of clearance yesterday and made a mistake that could have had tragic consequences. There’s an explanation for what happened but that’s all I’ll term it — an explanation, not an excuse. Our two female deminers were assigned to search a garden next to...
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Report 22 Bad weather moved in. It’s turned cold. Last night, an hour after dark, a heavy fog oozed down and drove us from the fire where we usually sit after dinner, alternately warming our hands and our feet. After we retreated to our tents, all we could do was layer on our warmest...
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