We agonized over the plight of a family who recently lost their daughter in an accident with Vietnam-era ordnance. Since the girls’ death last autumn her family has been afraid to return to the garden where the accident occurred. While we badly wanted to clear their land, we feared that by adding an unscheduled...
Read more »
Over recent years there has been a reduction in the number of accidents with UXO. That welcome change has been the result of great effort to raise public knowledge about ordnance and to teach villagers what actions might lead to an accident. The reduction of casualties has occurred over most age cohorts: school-aged youth,...
Read more »
In Laos 40% of victims of accidents with unexploded ordnance are children. That’s because children spend much of their time in the places where UXO can be found: gardens, pastures, walking trails, fields and forests. And, children are by nature more inquisitive and adventurous than other age groups. And here’s an irony! Immediately after...
Read more »
In earlier posts we described how a Lao construction company undertook the construction of a road without first clearing the roadway of old ordnance. Their actions put their workers at grave risk and ignored the safety of villagers who live near the construction zone. In the video embedded below we show how WHWV came...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
One-year old Pome faced a bleak future if he could not get treatment for his foot. He was born with a birth defect known as “club foot” (talipes equinovarus) but had never received medical care. People in his village knew him as the boy “with his foot on sideways”. His parents had no knowledge...
Read more »
A fifty-year-old man in Sop houn Village was attempting to expand his rice field. He died alone in the field so no one knows the exact detail of his death, but it was clear from the nature of his wounds that he fell victim to a cluster bomblet. Over 20,000 Lao citizens have been...
Read more »
This cluster munition should never have been moved, but we found it sitting on a tree stump. Obviously, some villager carried it from the place where it was found and placed it on the stump. Villagers know the risks associated with handling old American ordnance; they accept those risks because they want to keep...
Read more »
Noi is a soft-spoken grandmother living in Sop Houn. Her two accidents with old ordnance have left her frightened to dig or plant. Since she is a subsistence farmer, her fear is a terrible occupational handicap. In this interview Noi describes her most recent accident and shares her feelings about the event that so...
Read more »
During Project Phongsali we found numerous cluster bomblets designated the “M-83” in and around Sop Houn Village. This device has three fuses: an impact fuse, a mechanical timing fuse, and an anti-handling fuse. Containing over 200 grams of high explosive, they pack greater destructive power than most other, more frequently encountered, cluster munitions. The...
Read more »