(from Amanda Koster’s blog, while leading the SalaamGarage trip to Vietnam 1/2010)

dong ha, vietnam.
where i am sitting there ‘was’ a war going on.

the soil is very red here. it has a hi iron content. there are bombs in this soil. explosives which are still killing people, maiming people, blinding people, etc. people who have/had nothing to do with any conflict between north and south vietnam, or the united states or anything. kids who went out to play, thought a ‘bombie’ (cluster bomb) was a toy and kicked it. they may loose their site, legs and arms while their friends die right beside them. this is how it happens.

today i interviewed and photographed a few landmine survivors and victims (there is a difference here).

i am meeting these folks, seeing these places, learning about how things are now, post war. things are good and bad.

yesterday, january 15 quang li told me 14 people have died this year in quang tri province from explosives.

blair (exec. director of peacetrees vietnam) said it will take over 200 years to clear all the explosives in the soil in vietnam. over 200 years. 200 years. how long will this war last exactly?

besides iron i imagine there is a lot of blood as well. the soil here is very red here.

http://www.thanhniennews.com/features/?catid=10&newsid=55297

Photographer Janat Horn and Journalist Daysha Eaton’s Vietnam landmines story published at Vietnamese English Language paper Thanh Nie News.  Congrats you two!

Exerpt:

50-year-old Cuc lives in Dong Ha, just west of Hue. She has called the dusty town of less than twenty thousand people home for most of her life.

She survived the war years unharmed. But about ten years later a remnant of the war changed her life forever.

“It was an afternoon in 1986. I was cleaning the garden with my father. There was a landmine and I was severely injured. I just lay there in the garden for about an hour and then my family took me to hospital.”

It all happened so fast that she doesn’t remember much about the accident, only that people said it was a cluster bomb.

However, she does recall the despair she felt when she woke up in the hospital. “When I woke up the next day, I found out I had lost parts of my body… people were frightened when they saw me. When my family brought my son in, he was one year old then, he was scared and cried and he just wanted to go home. I was downhearted and I didn’t want to go back to my family.”

Unfortunately, Cuc’s story is not uncommon in Quang Tri. Since the war ended in 1975 more than seven thousand people have been killed or injured by unexploded ordnance, or UXO, in the province.

Thanks to SalaamGarage partner NGO Peacetrees Vietnam for being so instrumental in clearing Quang Tri Provence of UXO’s.  Please read further this powerful story reported on during January 2010 SalaamGarage Trip to Vietnam here:

http://www.thanhniennews.com/features/?catid=10&newsid=55297