Youa Thaiyang is standing at the edge of his field in the northern Laos province of Xieng Khouang. A slight man of 61, dressed in jeans and flip-flops, he’s showing a photo of a BLU-26 submunition to a community liaison officer from bomb clearance charity the Mines Advisory Group (Mag). The rusted, innocuous looking “bombie”, the size and shape of a tennis ball, is half-hidden in a pile of leaves.
Thaiyang had been burning his field that day in order to plant cassava when he spotted the BLU-26. “I was lucky, I saw it by chance – a lot of farmers around here have been killed by unexploded bombs,” he says. His near-miss is a reminder of how people here play a daily game of Russian roulette simply to farm their land.
