Nong District - Savanakhet Province - Lao Peoples Democratic Republic Legends abound about the Ho Chi Minh Trail. While most Americans associate the term with the Vietnam War, the trail was actually cut through the forests of Laos in the late 1950’s as an infiltration network for Viet Minh forces moving from north to south in...
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Odoumsouk Village – Nakai District – Khammouan Province – Lao Peoples Democratic Republic I arrived back on the Nakai Plateau two nights ago. It was raining then and it hasn’t stopped since. This is the rainy season so it’s nothing out of the ordinary, but coming here directly from droughty conditions in Wisconsin the...
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Tha Lang Village - Khammouan Province - Lao Peoples Democratic Republic Americans and other Westerners sometime rationalize the low life expectancy, high infant mortality, and staggering accidental death rate of Asians by repeating the old saw, “Life is cheap in Asia.” What that observation implies is that we in the West value the lives of our...
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Since the year 2000, we have been assembling a museum-quality collection of cultural artifacts. The items we acquire have seen actual use in Lao, Hmong, Khamu, Akha and other ethnic communities throughout Laos. Accompanying each artifact are photographs documenting the context in which the item is used within family or community life. The collection...
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The Exhibit As we have worked in America and Southeast Asia we have assembled a remarkable collection of photographs, videos, cultural artifacts, oral histories and other documents. These resources have been organized into a traveling exhibition entitled, From Laos to America: Changing Worlds, Changing Lives. Schools, universities, student groups, museums, cultural centers, religious congregations and...
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Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the world. During the Indochina War, American planes flew 580,000 bomb runs over Laos and dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs, including over 200 million cluster bomblets. Today, as many as 27 million bomblets remain. Since the war ended, more than 40,000 Lao people...
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Yesterday we made the village of Oudomsouk a safer place to live. Readers might remember that several months ago I wrote about the 750-pound bomb that was located under a house in the middle of the village. The bomb was discovered a couple of years ago by the homeowner when he was digging a...
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Understandably, people who make charitable donations want their money to go to individuals and causes that are truly needy. Here in Laos most of the population is poor; eighty percent of the population lives at a subsistence level. Most people consume all the food that they grow in their fields or find in the...
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Last spring, students at D.C. Everest Middle School in Weston, Wisconsin sent me off to Laos with several hundred dollars of “good deed” money to share with victims of accidents with landmines and bombs. They asked that some of their funds also be used to remove unexploded ordnance and thereby prevent future pain and...
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Sometimes looking for bombs is pure science. We look out over the surface of a landscape and haven’t a clue where the suspected ordnance lurks. All we can do is crank up our metal detectors (devices that are both sophisticated and expensive — a far cry from what you would use to find coins...
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