At Clear Path, we say we pride ourselves in reaching out to landmine survivors. But what does that mean? Well, our group got a taste of it in Cambodia.
In our three project countries --Vietnam, Cambodia and on the Thai-Burma border -- it�s our staff or partner organization who work with the survivors on a daily basis.
In Vietnam, it�s office staff of five: Toan, Chi, Phuong, Duc and Nhi. They cover a territory of 14 provinces along the central coast. Sometimes, the outreach is done remotely, through banking wires and local agencies that dispense our assistance to the families involved in the accidental explosions in this big area.
But most of the time, the staff responds directly to accidents and personally assesses the needs of existing survivors all over the former DMZ area. And they are fast. Thanks to a growing network of reporting relations, they get news about an accident within hours of its occurrence.
Says Dave Greenhalgh, project manager at Mines Advisory Group, the British mine-clearance organization whose office is next-door to ours in Dong Ha: �I will hear about an accident in the morning and the CPI staff will already be at the hospital by lunch. They are amazing.�
Duc gets behind the wheel of the Nissan Patrol, a sturdy 4x4, and heads off to where the team is needed with Chi and/or with Toan or Nhi. Since the territory we cover runs up to the mountainous border with Laos, reaching survivors there isn�t a stroll in the park.
Even a Patrol gets you only so far. Paths to the farms can be narrow, so they have to get out and walk. Some of the hill tribe villages are only reachable on foot. When I was going through some shots the staff sent recently, I caught an image of the team hiking through a rolling green sea of jungle mountains wearing their rain coats and looking very determined to let nothing stand in the way of CPI outreach!
In Cambodia, our partner organization � Cambodian Volunteers for Community Development � faces an equally challenging task reaching out to landmine survivors. Both countries are largely rural and a big number of survivors live out in the sticks.
Sarath but mostly Chanthon, who represents CPI at CVCD, travel for miles on the dusty rutted roads in Kampong Cham Province to reach out to potential students for or to keep track of graduates from our vocational skills training center for landmine survivors in Stoeung Trung.
The road is pretty decent from Phnom Penh to Kampong Cham City: asphalt with potholes and dips sprinkled throughout. There used to be a boat up to Stoeung Trung, but since they built a road to this town on the wide and sluggish Mekong River, the boat owners were forced out of business.
That new road sounded good to us before we first saw it. We discovered it�s a glorified dirt strip meandering along the riverbank through the many Cham villages. We were told there were plans to improve it further, but in the last election these villagers voted for the Sam Raimsey Party instead of the Cambodian People�s Party of Prime Minister Hun Sen so road improvement plans here got pushed to the backburner.
You have to remember this is the dry season in Cambodia. Even with that, the road had some serious mud ponds. At one of them in the middle of a village, there was simply no other way but to go through it. There were huts and vegetables gardens blocking any path around it.
These hovels are photogenic to say the least: homes with thatched roofs or rough teak sides built on stilts in a traditional style to escape annual flooding in this flat land near the Mekong. Except for the occasional homeowner who can afford paint, the tones of the huts, the oxen carts, ruddy road and grazing water buffalo are beautifully monochromatic. It�s visually held together by a �glue� of fine red-brown dust that settles on everything after traffic passes.
Our minivan driver, who was phenomenal during all of our four days in the countryside, took a running start and headed for the pond. But even for him, this was an insurmountable obstacle. Sure enough, we got stuck right in the middle, gears grinding, wheels spinning, villagers watching and gesturing in animation.
We had to get out, which was tricky. Erin, the photographer, stepped deep into the muck to the delight of the onlookers. Good-hearted Cham women nonetheless offered to rinse off her chocolate-colored sandals and feet. The driver tried again, but to no avail. We needed a hand and got one after we offered to pay some sinewy young Muslim men and boys a price in Riel for getting us out of our predicament.
They got behind the minivan, stepping deep into the soft goo and started heaving the once-white back hatch until it started moving forward, spinning and fishtailing out of the pond. I couldn�t help feel there was some planned entrepreneurial aspect to the speed at which the strapping backs came to our aid. But the rescue was worth the toll.
A little further down the road, we were asked to make a financial contribution to a village effort to fill the many bone-jarring holes and treacherous puddles -- something I thought imminently more constructive. Of course, any constant care of this road has to be a labor of love since the slightest subtropical rain washes the handiwork away.
I can only imagine what all this looks like when the monsoons arrive in the coming months.
No comments:
Post a Comment