Week Four Day Twenty-Four It’s become clear to me why so many villages are littered with old bomb casings that still contain fuses, boosters and other dangerous components. The construction company that is rebuilding the road that runs through the southern districts of this province is working on uncleared land and is, as one...
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Week Four Day Twenty-Three One important lesson for anyone who has a job that requires following a Lao farmer into the forest to look for ordnance (or bamboo shoots, or a lost water buffalo, or anything else). If the farmer starts out, takes a few steps, stops, contemplates, and then returns to his house...
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Week Four Day Twenty-Two We’re not quite through our first week of work with the complete team, but I’m beginning to see a pattern emerging that will require us to adapt and adjust. Most mornings we’ve headed out of camp intending to search schoolyards and destroy any ordnance that we find lurking under foot....
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Week Three Day Twenty-One Every morning speakers hooked to the village public address system issue a community-wide wake up call. First, we’re gifted spirited strains of martial music. Once awake, invigorated and inspired, we hear an enthusiastic reading of the local news. I doubt that villagers ever kick off neighborly small-talk with the question,...
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Week Three Day Twenty: Road conditions here are tough on us and our electronic equipment. Luckily, we humans are largely self-healing. Bounce me down the worst road in the province for a day. I may be coughing dust and spitting mud at the closing bell: stiff, sore, banged up and run down but, even...
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Week Three Day Nineteen: Today we the headed back to Sop Houn to destroy ordnance that villagers showed us last week. We started with a cluster bomb in a tree plantation. The woman who found the bomblet often carries her children with her to the fields so she can tend to their needs while...
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Week Three Day Eighteen: A couple of days ago an American couple living in Muang May invited me for a breakfast of coffee, fruit, bacon and eggs, an enjoyable change of pace after weeks of standard Lao breakfast fare: noodle soup, steamed greens and sticky rice. But, what I enjoyed most and devoured with...
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Week Three Day Seventeen: In the year 2000 the United States government provided Laos with maps that communicate most of what is known about the 580,000 bomb runs that America flew over Laos between 1964 and 1973. During those missions the US dropped over four million general purpose bombs, and 285 million cluster submunitions....
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Week Three Day Sixteen: Vilasak and four deminers left Vientiane two days ago and traveled up Route 13 to Luang Prabang and then on to Muang Khoua, by way of Oudomxai, retracing the route that Yai and I took two weeks ago. For them, the journey was far less comfortable than our trip. They...
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