Land Mines

Below 5* hotels at the House of Blues filled with wailing songs of loss, betrayal, welfare, neglect, abandonment, misery, hope and have mercy on slide guitar backed by a harmonica in the key of C in her crying heart, a 10-year old Cambodian girl stared up at mirrored skyscrapers watching the Wheel of Life flash prisms into sky.

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper working with imported 300-count Egyptian threaded linen. No lye. A thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage.

She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food. She is a quadriplegic, an amputee with one leg after discovering a land mine on her way home from school. Her t-shirt screams:

Beware of Land Mines

She wears a permanent tear on her left cheek.

She said: Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. Do you like my shirt? Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture? I don’t know how to read so I like to look at pictures. 

My country has 16 million people and maybe 6-10 million land mines. Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Too many died because we don’t have medical facilities. Mines are cheap.

A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000 to take out of the ground.

I’m really good at numbers.

Talk to me before you leave trails to explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places. I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn’t like it. He suffers from denial. He said it gave him nightmares. He’s seen too much horror and death in one life. So it goes.

My village is my world.

My village is the other world.

Where do you live?

I am one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year in the world by land mines remaining from some ongoing or forgotten conflict.

I love unpleasant facts.

I am a walking, talking, breathing encyclopedia of knowledge and wisdom.

Reports from the killing fields indicate there are 110 million land mines buried in 45 countries. It will cost $33 billion to remove them and take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines a year.

Cambodia, Angola, Afghanistan and Laos are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.

I hear children crying. Doctors struggle to remove pieces of metal from my skin. I cannot raise my bandaged hands to cover my ears. Perpetual crying penetrates my heart. Blood tears soak my skin.

The technical mine that took my right leg off that fateful day as I walked through pristine rice paddies near my village expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second as ball bearings shredded everything around me.

It may have been an American made M18A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range is 328 feet. Perhaps it was a plastic Russian PMN-2.

I never saw it.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding and shot me up with morphine.

All strangers in a strange land carried morphine.

Standard issue.

April 4th is International Day for Mine Assistance.