It wasn’t the first time someone has approached us with ordnance in hand, but it was the first time that my video camera was running and I captured the excitement on tape. We were in a village to discuss the safe removal of some ordnance and I was filming the team’s discussion of how...
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During August 2010 the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations held a competition in which chefs at several of Vientiane’s most popular restaurants were challenged to create meals that employed insect protein as the main ingredient. The objective of the event was both to pay tribute to native Lao cuisine and...
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Americans who’ve traveled in Laos will confirm that this is a nation of short people. My best posture, combined with an ambitious, vertebrae-cracking neck-stretch, still leaves me a hair under six feet tall. But, when I stand among residents of a typical Lao village I tower above everyone else- six inches taller than most...
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KRONENWETTER — Jim Harris’ career has taken an unlikely trajectory and has now come full circle. Since retiring as principal of Weston Elementary School in 2003, Harris, 63, of Kronenwetter developed a nonprofit organization called We Help War Victims. He and a crew he hires spend three months of the year finding and disposing...
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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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Bangkok Post 24/4/11 Mercenary turned monk passes away A former United States soldier of fortune who later became a monk in Thailand and helped hundreds of people overcome alcohol and drug addictions at the world famous Wat Tham Krabok in Saraburi has passed away. A spokesman for the temple said Phra Gordon, also known...
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Week Six Day Forty-Two Throughout Laos, in districts contaminated with UXO, just about every village has a resident bomb expert. It’s not an official position sanctioned by government; there’s no license required, no formal apprenticeship. It’s a distinction conferred by public approbation based upon observed deeds. Like membership on the US Supreme Court, the...
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Week Six Day Forty-One A lady tried to sell me a lizard. The fact that I knew there were live lizards in the arm-long bamboo tube that she carried, that they were hale and hardy, that they were nutritious and beneficial to health, that they were for sale at a good price, and that...
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Week Six Day Forty The Lao Construction Consortium (LCC) has earthmovers digging into hillsides that have never been cleared of lethal ordnance. In doing so, the company puts lives at risk. Most of the time, we see the shovels and other heavy equipment out in the countryside with just a few surveyors, flagmen and...
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