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Entries in land mines (12)

Wednesday
Oct252017

Land Mines - Ice Girl

  “Are you with us?” pleaded a Cambodian land mine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”

  She‘s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.

  The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

She’s one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by land mines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million land mines lie buried in 68 countries.

  It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.

  It costs $300–$900 to remove a mine. It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200–$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines.

Cambodia, Laos, Angola and Afghanistan 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.

She hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin.

The technical mine that took her right leg off that fateful day as she walked along village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart.

  It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet. Or maybe a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy.

She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate.

Fortunately or unfortunately, she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land all carried morphine.

 Cut the heavy deep and real shit, said a Banlung shaman.

  Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.

Fear is blissful ignorance.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Sunday
Aug092015

1st International Children's Conference - TLC 28

“We are not here for a long time. We are here for a good time,” laughed Meaning, a twelve-year old survivor wearing a ragged Beware of Land Mines skull and crossbones t-shirt and prosthesis leg scampering a random life pattern across fields near a stilted bamboo home in Cambodia.

“Are you with us?” pleaded a landmine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.

The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

She’s one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by land mines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million land mines lie buried in 68 countries.

It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.

It costs $300-$900 to remove a mine. It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines. 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.

*

Expanding her awareness of mankind’s genetic stupidity, Lucky showed Zeynep a Laos map illustrating Never-Never Land.

Lao Please Don’t Rush is the most heavily bombed country in history.

25% of villages in Laos are contaminated with UXO.

Upwards of 30% of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate.        

80 million unexploded bombs remain in Laos.

More than half of the UXO victims are children.

*

Meaning hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin. The technical mine that took her right leg away one fateful day as she played near village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart-mind.

It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet. Or maybe it was a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy. She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate. Fortunately or unfortunately she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land carried morphine.

*

Cut the heavy deep and real shit, said a female Banlung shaman.

Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.

Fear is blissful ignorance.

Meanwhile, the 1st International Beggar Conference convened in Toothpick, a wasteland near Bright Hope - a rusting rustic dream of exploratory ways and means with scientific cause and effect and logical rational certainty.

It was chaired by a distinguished group of Cambodian orphans.

NGO Fascists rented 12,000 orphans out to fake humanitarian organizations. Abandoned youth pleaded with ill-informed rich donors for marketing and branding money to feed international guilt and shame.

“Let’s eat,” said a fat banker moments before his yacht hit an iceberg in 2008.

“What you don’t see is fascinating,” said Zeynep, “like roots below the surface of appearances.”

“We have so much ice and they have so little,” said an Icelandic chess player attacking Death.

“Everyone comes to me. My patience is infinite,” said Death. “I make only one move and it’s always the correct one.”

Beggars, landmine victims, genocide survivors and sick and tired dehydrated dying starving neglected humans from 195 countries convened in sequestered committee rooms filled with suits, scholars, academics, UN personnel, CIA analysts, NGO profit motivated scam reps, IMF bankers and plastic ornamental steering mechanisms.

“We agree to disagree,” said Rich Suit.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said Wage Slave.

Orphans, beggars and children spoke about slave labor, hunger, exploitation, corruption, human trafficking, corrupt police states and the terrorism of economic poverty.

“Bad luck,” said a rich slave. “That’s a you problem, not a my problem.”

Children addressing global media held press conferences focusing jaundiced eyes on lenses, recorders and bleeding pens. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Sound bites sang starvation’s misery.

If it bleeds it leads.

Incoming! Bleeding hearts ran for cover.

Orphan motions for adjudication, arbitration, fairness, equality and equity were tabled for further deliberation and discussion nowadays.

The average monthly wage was $37 in a Bangladesh clothing factory. 350,000 Cambodian women making $61/month stitched garments for Korean export companies.

Give someone a sewing machine and with a little luck they’ll feed their family. Let’s Eat.

 

Saturday
Aug232014

1st International Beggar Conference

“We are not here for a long time. We are here for a good time,” laughed Meaning, a twelve-year old survivor wearing a ragged Beware of Land Mines skull and crossbones t-shirt and prosthesis leg scampering her random life pattern across fields near a stilted bamboo home in Cambodia.

  “Are you with us?” pleaded a land mine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”

  She‘s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.

  The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

  She’s one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by land mines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million land mines lie buried in 68 countries.

  It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.

  It costs $300–$900 to remove a mine. It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines. 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.

  Expanding her awareness, Lucky showed Zeynep a Laos map illustrating Never-Never Land.

  Laos Please Don’t Rush is the most heavily bombed country in history.

  25% of villages in Laos are contaminated with UXO.

  Upwards of 30% of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate. 80 million unexploded bombs remain in Laos.

  More than half of the UXO victims are children.

Meaning hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin. The technical mine that took her right leg away one fateful day as she walked along village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart-mind.

  It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet. Or maybe a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy. She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate. Fortunately or unfortunately she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land carried morphine.

 

Cut the heavy deep and real shit, said a female Banlung shaman.

Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.

Fear is ignorance.

 

Meanwhile, the 1st International Beggar Conference convened in Toothpick, a wasteland near Bright Hope - a rusting rustic dream of exploratory ways and means with scientific cause and effect and logical rational certainty.

It was chaired by a distinguished group of Cambodian orphans.

 NGO Fascists rented 12,000 orphans out to fake humanitarian organizations. Abandoned youth pleaded with rich donors for marketing and branding money to feed international guilt and shame.

“Let’s eat,” said a fat banker moments before his yacht hit an iceberg in 2008.

“What you don’t see is fascinating,” said Zeynep, “like roots below the surface of appearances.”

“We have so much ice and they have so little,” said an Icelandic chess player attacking Death.

“Everyone comes to me. My patience is infinite,” said Death. "I make only one move and it's always the correct one."

Beggars, land mine victims, survivors and sick and tired dehydrated dying starving neglected humans from 195 countries convened in sequestered committee rooms filled with suits, scholars, academics, UN personnel, CIA analysts, NGO profit motivated scam reps, IMF bankers and plastic ornamental steering mechanisms.

“We agree to disagree,” said Rich Suit.

“The enemy of your enemy is my friend,” said Wage Slave.

Orphans, beggars and children spoke about slave labor, hunger, exploitation, corruption, human trafficking, corrupt police states and the terrorism of economic poverty.

“Bad luck,” said a rich slave. “That’s a you problem, not a my problem.”

Children addressing global media held press conferences focusing jaundiced eyes on lenses, recorders and bleeding pens. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Sound bites sang starvation’s misery.

If it bleeds it leads.

Incoming! Bleeding hearts ran for cover.

Orphan motions for adjudication, arbitration, fairness, equality and equity were tabled for further deliberation and discussion nowadays.

The average monthly wage was $37 in a Bangladesh clothing factory. 350,000 Cambodian women making $61/month stitched garments for Korean export companies.

Give someone a sewing machine and with a little luck they’ll feed their family. Let’s Eat.

From a novella to be abandoned.

Wednesday
Jul102013

Giving Back on The Road

June was from Stockholm, Sweden. She visited Cambodia for a month. 36-years young.

She was a tight bundle of burning anxieties. “I don't know what I’m running away from. I don’t know what I'm running toward.”

A traveler talked about Angkor temple labyrinths as an allegory of life.

One door opens and one door closes but the passages can be a bitch, whispered a Cambodian ghost.

June had evolved as a willing victim of old lies. She'd believed lying authority figures; family, husband, boss and friends. She’d believed old controlling attitudes and belief systems of others.

Her new day in Cambodia offered opportunities for awareness and growth. Like other humans, to become authentic she’d eventually face her deepest fears and shadows. Either that or keep running scared with a hellhound on her trail.

“I want to cut all my hair off,” she said in Siem Reap. It was long curling blond movie star mane quality. She went to a salon. She was nervous. She swallowed hard. A woman cut it off.

“I feel lighter now, transformed.”

June altered her outward appearance, releasing old anxieties. By cutting her hair with bright shiny silver scissors as a symbolic gesture, June realized how she felt was more essential than how her stone cold colleagues in stone cold freezing Sweden might react. It was a small significant step on her new path. 

One day she experienced the influence of a remote Khmer village on her consciousness. She visited My Grandfather’s House 53 kilometers from Siem Reap. They’d converted a two story building into a school.

“What do you need?” she asked the village chief.

“We need clean drinking water.”

She bought a water purifier.

“We need electricity after 6 p.m.”

She purchased a battery so they’d have lights after dark.

Another day, returning from Angkor she stopped in a village. She met children. The next morning she invited a traveler to join her. She purchased bags of toothbrushes and toothpaste. They rolled through dry brown flat countryside and palm trees past simple stilted bamboo homes, women selling, cooking, cleaning, washing and working.

They were far away from a neon town filled with tourists doing Angkor Wat.

June talked a blue streak, unloading her honesty, hopes and dreams mixed with anxieties and fears, “I feel good doing this. I've never done anything like this before. My past life was all about anger, problems and conflicts. Now that I’m in Cambodia, what, less than a week, I’m beginning to learn about myself, seeing how my life was empty with no meaning. How it was all about pleasing others, buying useless things to make myself feel better.”

They turned onto a thin dirt track leading to a bamboo thatched home in a field. Half-naked kids played. Women and men rested in shade. June met the kids and a young mother.

“Here,” she smiled, handing them toothbrushes and toothpaste, “these are for you.” They were amazed. An 80-year old woman, a former Apsara dancer, performed quick delicate hand movements. June copied her to the delight of everyone.

“I’ll be back,” she yelled as kids waved goodbye. 

“I now feel more fulfilled.”

They stopped in a market village for coffee. Young girls selling small colorful bamboo paper birds descended on them. “Buy something? Look at my things.”

June met Leaf, 13, in the 5th grade. Leaf learned English selling to foreigners at temples after school. She taught village kids English.

“I saw a leader in the girl’s eyes,” June said. “Maybe I can help her, get an English teacher for her village. Give her an opportunity to really grow.”

June had to modify her dream for the girl. “Let's be practical,” the traveler suggested, “finding a Khmer English teacher for $40 a month in this area is like finding clean drinking water.”

The next day June bought a brand new pink bike for Leaf with a bell and basket. It said, NEW STAR on the chain guard. She went to a bookstore. She bought a whiteboard, markers, 20 English learning books, picture dictionaries and storybooks. She loaded them on a tuk-tuk and returned to the village. Leaf, her family and friends were waiting. They raised pigs, dad kills them, mom sells the meat in the market, older sisters hope to find a foreign boyfriend, get married, and escape.

“Here Leaf all this is for you,” said June. “The bike will help you get to school, temples and home. The whiteboard, markers and books will help you teach English.”

Leaf smiled. “Thank you.”

Leaf pedaled through dust and brown broken leaves around the house. June spread the books out. Kids explored new images, words, ABC alphabets and colors.

“I feel real good about this,” she said returning to town. “Real good. I’ve made a small difference in a young girl’s life. I am so grateful.”

***

On another toothbrush run June traveled along a remote dusty red road. She stopped at a bamboo shop selling small bags of soap and bananas.

A young girl wore a permanent tear on her left cheek. She was not smiling. Her t-shirt had a picture of a skull and bones.

Danger! Mines!

She said to June: “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 14.5 million people and maybe 6-10 million land mines. Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Many more have died because we don’t have medical facilities. Mines are cheap. A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000.00 to take out of the ground.

“I’m really good at numbers.

26,000 men, women and children are maimed or killed every year in the world by land mines leftover from ongoing or forgotten conflicts. 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. Cambodia, Angola, Iraq, and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

“40 percent of Cambodian land is unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians are amputees. A prosthetic limb costs $3,000.

“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. They call this 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. Where do you live?”

June's humbling life changing experience woke her up in Cambodia.

Tuesday
Apr032012

one leg

yes, said orphan, let's fly away.

elf agreed, after a month playing with spontaneous five-year young experts. 

where shall we go?

it's a small planet.

how about cambodia, we know it well.

ok. 9 months in laos learning, laughing, loving, sharing was a joy.

on fool's day they arrived in siem reap. a hustler showed up. i am poor. i need money for my family.

i remember this story, said elf.

it's an old one, said orphan. 

let's go see friends.

they walked into a gritty world, surrounded by empty glass and brass hotels.

children scavaged trash.

they passed a one legged man on crutches. what happened to him, asked elf.

he stepped on a land mine while planting rice.