Aki Ra, proprietor of the Cambodian Land Mine Museum is one of the most incredible human beings I've ever had the fortune to meet. A former child soldier for first the Khmer Rouge and then the invading Vietnamese, he specialized in laying landmines as well as disarming them. After the fighting stopped and the Khmer Rouge was routed, he joined the UN peacekeeping force that arrived in 1991 and went to work demining the country.

After the UN left, Aki Ra continued wandering around the country, voluntarily demining areas on his own. He wasn't paid by the government to do this, but grateful local villagers would give him a place to stay and food to eat.

Normally, demining landmines is a very time consuming process. For HALO, one of the three major authorized non-profit groups working to demine Cambodia, it takes $500, and 5 people to demine landmine. One guy goes in with a metal detector, finds a landmine, comes back out. The next guy comes in to confirm that it is a landmine, and the type, goes back out. The next guy comes in, digs a little hole next to the landmine, being very careful not to set it off. The fourth guy comes in with some TNT and puts it carefully in the hole around the landmine. They all stand back, clearing the area of about 200-500 meters around and give the signal for the 5th guy to detonate the mine. This can take anywhere from 1-2 hours.

But Aki Ra demines landmines the way he used to, when bullets and grenades flewover his head; with nothing more than a 2 foot long bamboo pole . No protective gear, no help, no nothing. He goes to an area, where landmines are known to be found and starts poking slowly through the dirt. When he bumps in to something, he pokes it cautiously, listening to the sound of the bamboo pole against the whatever is underneath the dirt. The sound will tell him what kind of landmine it is and how to demine it. Sometimes he has to dig cautiously in the dirt, take out the landmine, unscrew the top carefully and pull out the spark plug or the TNT. With other landmines, he slowly unscrews the pin, and renders it useless. How long does it take him to do this? The British volunteer, a guy working on a documentary about Aki Ra, told me that just this past December, he went up to the northern Cambodia border near Laos and watched him demine more than 100 landmines in about an hour and a half.

Landmine victims with their limbs blown off, are often stigmatized in Cambodia because they can do very little in a country where the main source of income comes from physical labor. Often, they can do nothing else but resort to begging.

So what did Mr. Ra do? Start a small center for landmine victims. Over the years of demining, he found and collected a ton of stuff, and eventually opened the landmine museum in Siem Reap, along the road to the Angkor Wat temples.

But this whole time, what he's been doing is illegal because civilians aren't supposed to go around demining or teaching farmers how to demine landmines (even though that almost all the farmers are former soldiers like him). The Cambodian government also shut down and raided his museum a couple times, and threw him in jail (and in Cambodia, that's a really really bad thing; in jail they take away all your clothes except for your underwear, and you lie on a shit stained concrete floor). The Cambodian government rationale? Aki Ra was promoting the "wrong kind of tourism." According to the government, tourists should only come to Cambodia to see the temples, not to see things like landmines.

But it's gotten alot better. Aki Ra has received widespread international attention because of his efforts and has letters of backing from almost every major NGO working in Cambodia today. What's really funny was that the Cambodian government wanted the leaders of the 3 major anti-demining groups in Cambodia, MAG (the first all-female demining teams), HALO Trust, and CMAC (Cambodian Mine Action Center) to sign letters to the court that what Aki Ra was doing was wrong, but they refused and actually backed what he was doing.

All this happened probably less than 2 years ago. Now, Aki Ra's Landmine Museum is on the verge of becoming an official NGO in Cambodia, which means that the Cambodian government can't come in and take all their money all the time. This kind of does have a happy ending; once they become an NGO, many international orgs, including the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA! Yay CIDA! I worked for them when I was in Beijing.) have promised funding to really boost their efforts.

I was absolutely stunned by the work that this guy has done. Not once on my trip have I felt more ashamed to be an American than when I was at the landmine museum. America, along with China and Russia are the top producers of landmines in the world. Now, I understand their argument that they need landmines for the zone between North and South Korea. But, first of all, South Korea makes their own landmines, AND THEY DON'T EXPORT THEM. WHY are we still producing landmines for export?

I applaud Bush's recent announcement that they're going to make it so that landmines have a shorter life span. As recently as this past Christmas, Aki Ra demined some U.S. landmines (and you know they're American because they say so, and they have instructions labeled on it that say: CAUTION!! DO NOT EAT CONTENTS!!!) that had a production date of 1965!!!

When I was there, I met a little boy who had his leg blown off by a landmine. When his older brothers heard the explosion, they came running to see what happened, and they set off two more landmines, killing them instantly. Shrapnel from the landmines they set off took out his eye. He doesn't care about his eye or his leg; he just wants his brothers back. I promised him that I would tell people about landmines and when I got back to the States, I would write letters to all our elected officials about him.

So please, if you have an ounce of time, dash off an email to someone, anyone and ask them to do what they can to change our current landmine policy.

If you happen to be in Cambodia, and have the time to stay in Siem Reap for a month or two, they accept volunteers to teach English and Japanese to landmine victims.

To learn more about Aki Ra, check out the landmine museum website at:
http://www.silence-band.com/cambodia/

To learn more about demining efforts in Cambodia:
http://maic.jmu.edu/journal/5.1/Focus/Rohan_Maxwell/maxwell.html