MAG in Xieng Khuang

So I was in Xieng Khuang with 3 guys from a Dept. of Defense office that provides mechanical mine/UXO equipment. They are looking at the possibility of providing mechanical vegetation cutters to Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a British NGO clearing UXO in Laos (and worldwide). They are currently clearing a 270 hectare (1 hectare = 10,000 sq. meters) piece of land that includes some land that is currently farmed, and some that will be farmed once cleared. The currently farmed land is by no means clear of UXO, as evidenced by the multiple explosions throughout the day as the roving team cleared small cluster bombs that farmers had found around the valley.

Anyway, this Aussie guy is the MAG technical manager who works with the Lao clearance teams, and he was one of our guides. He's the type of guy that has seen and done pretty much everything, the type of guy who nonchalantly mentions getting malaria 9 times in 12 months while working in remote areas of Congo, where he subsisted on rotten rice and dried monkey meat for weeks at a time and was shot in the hip.


The clearance teams and ordnance removal (by blowing them up on site) has become just part of daily life here, which includes breaks from working in the fields to go for a swim in a pond.


Rain threatened much of the day, and it moved across the valley a few times. We watched it warily, but it never got to us. It must have been a pretty heavy downpour for the people in its path, though.


UXO is unfortunately a cash crop for the people in the area. They search for it to sell for scrap, or use around the farm. Note the planter in the foreground, and the stilts on the rice stores in the background. The village in the below picture lost three 6 year old boys last month to a UXO accident. They were trying to open a bombie (cluster bomb) in order to get at the ball bearings inside to use them to shoot birds with their slingshots.