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Week One Day Two: We are packing for the trip north. Metal detectors, radios, bull horns, and a mile of firing cable. Everything we will need to search for ordnance and then destroy it. Well…everything except a sizable load of TNT. That will come up by special transport under the care of Vilasak, our...
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Week One Day One: As was the case last year, the starting date of our project hinged on our finding proper transport for our team and equipment. Our work in Laos occurs seasonally and never for more than three months at a crack. Given the fact that we don’t operate here year-round, it makes...
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Earlier this year we posted on this website a video that features a Lao toddler that we met while our UXO clearance team was working in Phongsali. The youngster, named Pome, was born with a birth defect called “congenital talipes equinovarus” (CTEV) a condition more commonly known as “club foot”. (See our posting for...
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British and American officials colluded in a plan to hoodwink parliament over a proposed ban on cluster bombs, the Guardian can disclose. According to leaked US embassy dispatches, David Miliband, who was Britain’s foreign secretary under Labour, approved the use of a loophole to manoeuvre around the ban and allow the US to keep...
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One-year old Pome faced a bleak future if he could not get treatment for his foot. He was born with a birth defect known as “club foot” (talipes equinovarus) but had never received medical care. People in his village knew him as the boy “with his foot on sideways”. His parents had no knowledge...
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A fifty-year-old man in Sop houn Village was attempting to expand his rice field. He died alone in the field so no one knows the exact detail of his death, but it was clear from the nature of his wounds that he fell victim to a cluster bomblet. Over 20,000 Lao citizens have been...
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This cluster munition should never have been moved, but we found it sitting on a tree stump. Obviously, some villager carried it from the place where it was found and placed it on the stump. Villagers know the risks associated with handling old American ordnance; they accept those risks because they want to keep...
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January 2011: Back to Phongsali Province! In January we’ll again take a nine- person team into Phongsali Province, and will offer villagers “Response Team” services to rid villages and surrounding countryside of old ordnance. Last year, our team focused our efforts on Ban Sop Houn: a village of 500 people, 96 houses, and 58...
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A 10-year-old girl was killed and her sister injured on Wednesday by a cluster bomb that exploded in Thasala village, Khamkeuth district, Borikhamxay province. The incident happened at about 11am, when Ms Pui, 10, was returning home from school and picked up an unexploded bomb. Her older sister Ms Paeng, 15, saw the bomb...
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New Zealand will provide $1.1 million to the Government of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic to help clear unexploded cluster munitions left in the north-east of the country, Disarmament and Arms Control Minister, Georgina te Heuheu, announced today. “More than thirty years after the end of the conflict in Indochina, cluster munitions and other...
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