Project Phongsali Daily Log: Week Three Day 15 PCL is still looking for a replacement truck for our project. (The company is one vehicle (and a driver) short due to the road accident in which Om, Noi, and Vonna were injured.) I decide to have a copy shop make a hard copy of the...
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Blog
Project Phongsali: Days 15 to 21
Project Phongsali: Days 8 to 14
Project Phongsali Daily Log: Week Two Day 8 Yai is definitely out of the Phongsali Project. He’s putting his affairs in order so he can check into a hospital for more tests and treatment. His joint ache is worse, his swollen leg is larger. If he feels as bad as he looks, he’s in...
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Visiting Om in the Hospital – Lao families provide patient care in the hospitals.
Vientiane - Lao Peoples’ Democratic Republic On the day I arrived in Laos my friend Om was nearly killed in a road accident. About the same time that I was collecting my baggage at the airport, Om and three of his friends were driving from Khammouan Province to Vientiane in a low-slung flatbed truck, returning...
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Project Phongsali: Days 1 to 7
Project Phongsali Daily Log: Week One Day 1 I arrive in Vientiane at midday on a flight from Taipei via Bangkok. My assistant and interpreter, Bounnphasit Xayavong, “Yai” to his friends, picks me up at the airport. It’s the peak of the tourist season and I have no hotel reservation but I am confident...
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Aspirations
Vientiane – Lao People’s Democratic Republic Eighty five per cent of the people in Laos practice subsistence agriculture in which they consume almost everything they produce and have little surplus to sell for cash. Those Lao who work for wages accept pay that most Americans would consider extraordinarily low. In most places throughout this...
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January 2010 Newsletter
Last spring as the rainy season began in northern Laos, we left Phongsali Province but promised villagers that we would return during the dry season to help them clear their land of bombs and other old ordnance left from the Vietnam War. Click on the image below to read a PDF version of the...
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When fighting stops, the consequences of war go on.
The Indochina War ended over thirty years ago, but that distant conflict still impacts the lives of millions of people in both Asia and America. At the conclusion of hostilities, hundreds of thousands of people found themselves displaced from their homes. Many left Laos for uncertain life in refugee camps in neighboring countries and...
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Partnering with COPE to help amputees.
Vientiane Lao Peoples Democratic Republic Time and again, when I encounter accident victims in need of surgery or a prosthesis, I turn to my friends at COPE (Cooperative Orthotics and Prosthetics Enterprise) a non-governmental organization providing supportive services to patients at the National Rehabilitation Center in Vientiane. Recently I returned to Boualapha District in...
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Ta, an accident victim assisted by WHWV, represents Laos in Oslo at the Cluster Munitions Treaty signing.
Vientiane Lao Peoples Democratic Republic My friend Ta Duangchom has seen far more hard times than good. When I met him several years ago he was walking aimlessly through his village, filthy, shoeless, wearing a ripped shirt and what I later learned was his only pair of pants. It was his daily habit to...
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Over 100 nations sign ban on cluster munitions.
Vientiane, Lao Peoples Democratic Republic Laos is not the only country in the world contaminated by cluster munitions. Over the past forty years, cluster munitions have been dropped on 29 different nations, killing or injuring an estimated 100,000 people. And, every country that has ever been struck by cluster munitions continues to suffer, to some...
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