Day 47 The head schoolteacher finally wore down the last opposition to expanding the schoolyard. She is a force to contend with, and probably a great teacher. Every time I pass her classroom, she has her students on task doing math problems in their notebooks or copying her reading lesson from the chalkboard. To...
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Day 46 Every day we do two or three demolitions. Soon the team will catch up to Yai and me as the stream of villagers taking us to see ordnance has finally slowed. Once the team is right on our heels, we’ll put the guys to work surveying the schoolyard and clearing it of...
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Day 45 When we go to the site of reported ordnance and find the items have gone missing, the first thing we do is scan the immediate countryside asking ourselves, “If I found ordnance and decided to move it in order to keep my family safe, where would I put it?” Then, we check...
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Day 44 Last year when I first visited Sop Houn, I met a little girl who is visually impaired; each of her eyes is clouded over by white patches that I assume are either cataracts or corneal scars. There wasn’t much more that I could do last year than take photographs to pass around...
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Day 43 The head school teacher here is a bit frustrated by the process of getting agreement on clearing a land parcel adjacent to the school in order to enlarge the school grounds. There is no school board or village council per se that meets and votes on issues and proposals. Rather, the village...
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Vientiane - Laos Peoples’ Democratic Republic During World War II, on small islands in the South Pacific, indigenous villagers were jolted from a stone-age existence and propelled into the twentieth century by the arrival of modern machines: the most advanced technology produced by the mid-century, industrialized world. Villagers could only explain the functioning of ships,...
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Day 42 I saw it coming and couldn’t do a thing about it except hold my breath and wait. A stoop-shouldered, white-haired man surrounded by a gaggle of children limped on stiff joints out of the woods behind our camp and headed straight for me. I could read the situation like a book: a...
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Day 41 Sop Houn sits along the Nuea River which, in addition to being the best communication link with other settlements east and west of here, provides the villagers with water for drinking, cooking, bathing, and is a dependable source of food. The fact that I don’t see many people drying fish in the...
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Day 40 A few days ago, in one of my postings, I characterized the guys on our team as fun-loving, hard playing. I wrote that with the arrival of the full team, I now had to assume the role of fraternity housemother in an effort to keep the guys on the straight and narrow....
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