Good Samaritans here also have to consider the consequences of transporting a sick or injured person in their car or, offering shelter to someone who might die in their home. And often the impulse to help must be reconciled with deeply help spiritual believes.When nine-year-old Hamm was critically injured by an exploding bombie, his...
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Yesterday evening our replacement medic arrived from Sekong. Our first medic bugged out in Vientiane giving no good reason; the guys all assume that, having experienced Dak Cheung District before, he just wasn’t up to the rigors. His replacement, a medic borrowed from another company, arrived telling us he could stay for two weeks....
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In my opinion Moses fiddled around too long experimenting with calamities that might impose an attitude adjustment on a hard-hearted Pharaoh: water to blood, boils, locusts, fleas, frogs, firestorms and more—concluding with (IMHO) the unnecessary deaths of many firstborn children. Too bad that Moses didn’t think to inflict Laotian mites upon the Egyptians right...
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Yesterday when the trucks pulled into this site and the team offloaded all our gear, there wasn’t much that we could do until the deminers first checked the site for unexploded ordnance. We were told that a construction company had previously used the site, but we would never trust that another organization had properly...
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This morning I woke up cold and crabby at a guesthouse in Dak Cheung. Last night the five of us traveling in the Land Cruiser arrived in the district well after dark, a consequence of our making a sweeping, two-hour detour to a neighboring province to locate a fellow who had agreed, via phone,...
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A US rights envoy on Monday appealed to Laos for more information on a prominent activist missing for two months, saying the case was having a “chilling effect” on civil society groups. Sombath Somphone, the 62-year-old founder of a non-governmental organisation campaigning for sustainable development, disappeared in Vientiane while driving home on December 15....
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Our project in Sekong still has eleven days to go, but I’m starting to reflect on the early days, back in January. An issue this year was quality of footwear. Many of the deminers reported to work wearing only flip-flops. The guys all have calloused feet toughened by years of working barefoot out of...
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There’s talk of bringing bomb detection dogs back to Laos. About ten years ago MAG, the Mines Advisory Group, brought two dogs from Sweden for trials. The dogs worked well with their Swedish handlers, but were an expensive addition to MAG clearance efforts and there was doubt, in the end, about whether the dogs’...
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We visited a school and asked students if anyone knew of problem ordnance near their village. Sure enough, several girls told us that their friend had come upon a cluster bomblet while collecting bamboo shoots. None of the girls new the location of the bomblet; we would have to talk to their friend who...
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Among the various livelihood projects that we are enabling few are more popular than fishponds. And, what’s not to like? The ponds don’t have to be big to serve as a suitable habitat for small fish, frogs, snails, crustaceans, and other edible organisms that are already part of the Lao villagers’ diet. With a...
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