Happy 150th Canada. No celebrations that we could find in Vientiane. Oh well, we did some FaceTime'ing and Nate asked his friend Adrien to save him a piece of cake from the pool. We then walked over to the COPE centre, the Cooperative Orthopedic and Prosthetic Enterprise.
Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the world. The Ho Chi Minh trail from Northern Vietnam to Southern Vietnam went through Laos. From 1964 to 1973, the US dropped over 2 million tons of ordnance over Laos in 580 000 bombing missions, the equivalent of one plane load every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day for nine years. 270 million cluster bomblets were dropped, but about 80 million of these did not explode. Now farmers digging in fields, children finding the metal balls and playing with them, people cooking on the ground and therefore heating up the ground, and people trying to find the bomblets for scrap metal all result in dire consequences for many. International groups are now assisting with systematically going through the country to find and safely remove the bomblets. This has drastically reduce the casualties that the Laos people encountered every year. A very interesting museum.
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| More temple shots, a very common sight. |
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