ROMP Report Laos 8/25/2008
From 1965 to 1975 the United States Air Force flew 500,000 bombing missions over the small, landlocked, South East Asian country of Laos. In total 2 million tons of bombs were dropped with an estimated 30% remaining unexploded and on the ground to this day. Unexploded ordinance (UXO) affects thousands of Laotians annually, 35 years after the bombings stopped. “Laos is the most heavily bombed country on the face of the planet,” states Laith Stevens, in the terrifying documentary Bomb Harvest.
Unexploded, sadly, does not mean cannot explode and when the UXO does detonate the damage is horrifying. The Cooperative Orthotic & Prosthetic Enterprise (COPE) in Vientiene, Laos reports that 50% of its amputee patients are UXO victims and that since the bombing runs ceased UXO has killed an estimated 12,000 civilians. The effects are particularly devastating for children and farmers. The majority of UXO comes from cluster bombs. A cluster bomb was a large metal casing containing 680 tennis-ball sized smaller bombs, called bombies. When dropped the casing would open above the earth’s surface and scatter the hundreds of bombies onto the ground. Many landed in soft ground and never detonated. They have a killing radius of 30 meters.
More than a quarter of all agricultural land and 25 percent of villages are still contaminated with UXO. Awareness and avoidance of the bombs are daily survival techniques for many Laotians and from an early age they know how to identify them. So why would a child pick one up in the first place, or an aware adult for that matter? Ironically, the bombs themselves have become a resource for desperately poor Laotians who can earn $.25 per kilogram of scrap metal. Bomb casings, unexploded 500 pound bombs, cluster bombs and many other deadly “scrap” are fashioned into buckets, canoes and lanterns or sold for food, clothing and other necessities. In one photographed instance, dozens of unexploded five foot long bombs were piled up next to a home in the middle of a village as a sort of family savings account; a deadly nest egg. Children know this just as well as adults and that is one more reason that the little metal ball at their feet begs to be carried away.
UXO is why COPE exists in Laos. While diabetes and vascular disease are the leading causes of amputation in places like the United States UXO tops the list of amputation causes here in Laos followed by traffic accidents and diseases like leprosy and gangrenous infections. Therefore, the amputees here are generally young people. They were probably farming a rice paddy or fishing or collecting wood when one or more of their limbs were blown off by 35 year old weaponry. COPE helps these people with amputations regain mobility and independence by providing prostheses, orthoses and physical and occupational therapy. The mission of the Range Of Motion project (ROMP) is to provide O&P rehabilitation to people who do not have access to these services. COPE has this same responsibility in Laos being the only provider of any type of O&P service in the country. They do an excellent job in the face of such a daunting task.
COPE employs the simple but functional Red Cross prosthetic system. “We deliver about 30 prostheses every month while performing follow-up, gait training, orthotioc devices and new evaluations,” says Jo Pereira, Service Coordinator and Occupational Therapist for COPE. All services are provided by Laotian professionals trained at the O&P school in Cambodia. They also manufacture wheelchairs as well as the prosthetic feet and plastic adapters used in assembly of the Red Cross system. It’s a very cost-effective approach that has allowed COPE to provide continuous care for eleven years in Laos.
It’s hard not to compare and contrast the work of ROMP with organizations such as COPE. What are their strengths and weaknesses? What are ours? Most importantly to learn from groups like COPE who are up against different challenges than the ones we face in Guatemala and the rest of Latin America. The final goal always being to educate and adequately supply a new generation of local professionals who can tackle this problem whether caused by UXO, landmines, disease, accident or warfare.
Our visit with COPE lasted a day but the work goes on all year as does the operation of the ROMP clinic in Zacapa. For more information or to help please COPE: www.copelaos.org.
