Day 62 The Tai Deng people in this village are celebrating an annual festival that doesn’t have an official name. When pressed, people simply refer to it as the “Support Your Village Festival”. All three dominant ethnic groups in Sop Houn, the Tai Deng, the Tai Dam, and the Khmu, are animists, not Buddhist....
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Day 61 Just before lunch a fellow led us up the steep hill behind his house to a bomb crater filled knee-deep with chopped corn stalks, his safe deposit box for ordnance that he finds in his garden or rice field. His intent was to show us six identical items of UXO that he’d...
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Day 60 Yai has returned from taking the three visually impaired villagers to the eye clinic in Oudomxai. The return trip presented the same challenges as the outbound journey. Ruts, dust and heat. Roller coaster thrills alternated with hours of boredom. The villagers again became violently carsick. On one narrow section of road a...
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Day 59 Mr. Seeun, the blacksmith’s brother, is constructing a house. He asked our team to clear the lot where he and his friends are currently building the traditional, stilted, thatched-roof, bamboo-walled structure. I had to turn down his request. Our project just doesn’t have the funding to permit us to conduct time-intensive, “sub-surface”...
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Day 58 Yai’s been gone for two days and phone contact with him has been frustrating. He’s in Odumxai within easy range of cell phone towers so the problem must be on my end. The three blind villagers that he’s guiding left here smiling, waving, and calling “bye-bye” to my camera, all happy to...
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Day 57 We destroyed the 750 today. My first decision of the day was whether to work the exploder and detonate the charge, or position myself where I could film the demolition. When we destroy a big bomb, we can certainly feel the concussion and hear the explosion but we usually work blind because...
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Day 56 Our guys have collected a lot of bomb fragments during their work in the schoolyard, and Jerry Redfern, my friend the visiting photojournalist, decided to take a couple of the larger shards to the village blacksmith for him to fashion into knives and a machete. The bombs America dropped here were made...
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Last month, we spent nine days in the field with Jim Harris’s team in rural Phongsali province. We camped at the local dispensary and showered with cold river water, which was piped uphill to the village. The team hired two young women to cook, clean and launder. Our meals were served communally, outside, on...
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Day 55 Karen and Jerry are getting some excellent interviews and photographs. I’ve made Yai available to serve as their interpreter, but that offer expires within hours, as Yai departs later this afternoon for a two-day trip, via local buses, to the city of Oudomxai, capital of Oudomxai Province. Yai’s guiding three visually impaired...
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