A very sad day in Vientiane

Our last day in Vientiane was also our chosen day to visit the COPE visitor centre, a museum and charity which works with the victims of UXO, and which I’d read about before leaving home.

UXO is unexploded ordinance – left over bombs from the Vietnam (or American, depends which way you look at it) war. Laos has the dubious distinction of being the most bombed country in the world, ever. Ironic really considering they weren’t officially part of the war but just had the bad luck of being right beside Vietnam. America doesn’t acknowledge dropping bombs here, which is laughable when you see the damage they caused, are still causing, and the massive clean up effort which is still very much under way. I will never understand why America doesn’t have people here clearing land, or at the very least paying massive reparation to this country. But anyhow.

So most of the bombs were cluster bombs, these drop hundreds of small ‘bombies’ or ‘bomblets’ a bit smaller than a tennis ball. Millions and millions of these were dropped and many are still in the ground, waiting. Today, people still get killed or seriously injured by these on a depressingly regular basis. The injured generally lose limbs as the medical care here isn’t good enough to save them, or rural people live too far away to reach it.

That’s where COPE comes in, helping people receive prostheses and other appropriate aids to help them get back to some kind of normal life. It costs about $450 to do this for one person, and without the charity money raised – it just wouldn’t happen. From what I gather, public health care will save your life here, but that’s about it.

The visitor centre has a brilliant small museum attached, which tells the stories. I started losing the plot a bit after reading about the family of four kids making a fire to keep warm in winter (over a lurking bomblet of course). They all died, including their three year old. There are thousands of stories like this. M was full of questions about the prostheses (or pretend arms and legs in her words), why people needed them, how they lost their own ones, why people would drop bombs……… And on and on. I did my best to give her factual answers but damn it was hard, there’s no nice way to explain and my voice started wobbling and cracking every time.

After donating a wad of kip (we are multi, multi millionaires here) we left and immediately ran into a young guy aged about 20 on his way to the centre. He had no hands, and was blind. At that point I burst into tears. You may call me a bleeding heart leftie liberal, but frankly my heart is bleeding.