Thursday, March 16, 2006

Touring the Heavily Bombed Province of Quang Binh Vietnam

Yesterday, we packed up the
Patrol
and headed to Quang Binh Province for a site visit with one of the Clear Path beneficiaries and to have a meeting with a partner NGO. Quang Binh Province neighbors Quang Tri Province to the North. During wartime, it was the southern most province in north Viet Nam. American forces employed intense aerial bombing on the province in an attempt to thwart the military supply chain known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. For fifteen years, from 1960 to 1975 bombs were dropped on this province nearly every day. My friend, Lanh, who is an interpretor for Mines Advisory Group, grew up in Quang Binh Province. She remembers the daily bombings and how she used to have to go underground when the alert signal was sounded. Lanh still lives in the province and she invited us to join her for a day trip after our work on Saturday.

We went to the Phong Nha caves in Ke Bang National Park. What an experience. This is the first time that I have travelled further north than Le Thuy in Quang Binh. The Caves are included as a World Heritage site. The beginning of the experience at the park was quite familiar. You buy tickets and wander around vendors stalls before climbing aboard a boat to head down the river towards the caves. The ride is about half an hour and the landscape is simply breathtaking. The river is banked by abrupt limestone cliffs cloaked in triple canopy forest and it meanders toward the cave entrance a few clicks from the boat launch.

The mouth of the cave is enormous. The boat pilot smartly guides us through the twists and turns once we are inside. The ceiling is dripping with limestone, making taffy-like streams that drop into the water. It is so cool. The Vietnamese have rigged lights behind some of the more dramatic cave effects and it gives it an almost Disney World like feeling. Hard to imagine that it is real...After the boat tour we dock and head out on foot to the 'dry cave'.


The gals at the foot of the climb claim it is 580 steps to the top but it might as well be Mount Everest with the intense heat and incline of the steps. Terri (my mother in-law) and I feel that we are pretty good specimens of health yet this challenge set before us is a bit humbling to say the least. We climb, take a break, climb, take a break and climb, climb, climb, take a break and finally we are there to a cave entrance which is mercifully cool and dark The trails vietnam bomb craters.jpgcarve deep into the mountain, circling down as you move forward. On the climb out of the cave it is clear that we are almost to the entrance because the heat begins to wrap around us. Luckily going down is a bit easier than going up...at least it is easier on the heart.

The view of the land below is beautiful with the various shades of green of the rice paddies, corn fields and mountain forests. As I scan the landscape I notice the circular pock marks that are most definitely bomb craters. I ask Lanh and she says that Ho Chi Minh Trail was very close by and that soldiers would use the cave as a hiding and meeting place. She said that the entrance to the cave was damaged a bit but the bombing never managed to close it off completely.

Quang Binh Province remains one of the most heavily bomb-impacted provinces in Vietnam. Thirty years after the war, accidents still occur on a near daily basis.







Tuesday, March 7, 2006

HAPPY WOMEN'S DAY !

Friends,

March 8th is the special day for every woman in the world for it is recognized as the International Women's Day.

May we at Clear Path International wish you all a Happy Women's Day!
Copy of Women Day_2006 3.JPG

Clear Path Team


Monday, March 6, 2006

THREE YEARS OLD BOY INJURED IN A UXO ACCIDENT IN QUANG TRI, VIET NAM

When I first received the brief information over the phone about the accident, I couldn�t imagine how a three years old boy could involve in a UXO accident. For he is too small to cause anything that lead to a detonation of a UXO, and that UXO is not that available for small kids like him to lay a finger on. If he was a by-stander then why there was no other casualty reported. I took the truck out of the garage, head to the Quang Tri general hospital, still trying to answer those questions to myself.

The boy was sleeping as the pain killer still had its effect. The doctors had just had an operation to remove fragments. He had black eyes, but it was difficult to tell whether they were also injured or not. The boy was cared by his grandmother while his father had just gone out to get some medicine for him. Copy of Nguyen Van Linh 3.JPG

View a movie here

Linh spent almost the entire morning of February 26th, 2006 playing by himself, alone. His mother was too busy taking care of Linh�s younger sibling, who was just several months of age; his father had gone to the farm and his 5 year-old brother had gone with a 7 year-old neighbor boy playing somewhere. Linh came and sat at the threshold, staring out into the front yard... And then he saw his brother with the neighbor boy came back, discussing something lively. Linh walked out to meet them but the elders seemed didn�t want to play with the small kid, thus they quickly threw something into a corner of the yard, turned around and ran away.
Linh felt so disappointed. He turned to walk back into the house, and when he was turning, he saw the thing that the elder boys had left at the corner. Linh walked towards it, picked it up. The boy took the device for a sweet potato with red mud stuck out side, and that made him feel hungry. Just as he entered the kitchen, he saw his father arrived home. The boy just said hi to his father and kept walking into the kitchen. He sat in front of the fire, and put the �potato� into the fire to bake it (he had learned this from his older brother and often does this whenever hungry).
Nobody knew what was happening in the kitchen. As when Linh�s father got home, he entered the house, poured himself a huge glass of water and sat at the threshold to drink. Then there came the explosion from the kitchen. Linh received multiple injuries in his left wrist, fingers, his face and his legs. Luckily, there was no injury in vital parts.

Saturday, March 4, 2006

Clear Path Needs Place to Store Gear Near Seattle

Clear Path International needs new space to store medical supplies in the Seattle area!

Can you help or know someone who can?

Here is a link to a story on in the Seattle Post Intelligencer:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/261758_landmines04.html