Still Dangerous After 35 Years

When I first visited Vietnam more than a decade ago, it wasn't immediately obviously to me that this Southeast Asian nation was a war-ravaged country.

Certainly, there were crater marks in the landscape as we flew into Hue City, and on our way to Dong Ha, Quang Tri Province, I saw a number of roadside bunkers and watchtowers that stood as a quiet testament to the conflict that had ended a quarter century before I first traveled there.

But even the mostly rural province of Quang Tri looked like it had healed a lot since that time. Building were going up every. There were as many scooters as there were bicycles. People carried cell phones, and the markets seemed abundant with everything from fresh produce to faux Gucci handbags.

Then I was introduced to a different reality - a world hidden beneath the surface of all that progress and activity in this fast-growing, emerging economy.

First, I visited the area of the former Dong Ha Combat Base, once home to 50,000 troops attached to the 3rd Marine Division. The rusting gates of the sprawling compound that served the many fire bases along the Demilitarized Zone were still standing. As the city of Dong Ha receded behind us, all we could see was the red dirt and scrawny bush of a wasteland that ranked as one of the most bomb-contaminated places in Vietnam.

This was the site of our first project: to clear 110 acres of the former Dong Ha military base with charitable funds from the Freeman Foundation in Vermont. It was one of the most ambitious initiatives of its kind by a U.S.-based nonprofit operating in Vietnam, and it took us a year and a half to make it safe for low-income housing, city streets and a school.

At first, this was our mission: to clear up unexploded ordnance where it threatened the daily lives of the disadvantaged. But we soon discovered it was only a gateway to our ultimate mandate: to aid those local families whose members who were injured or killed on a weekly basis in central Vietnam.

As soon as we launched the clearance project, we became a magnet for requests from survivors of landmine and UXO accidents whom we learned were not getting any support in a significant or coordinated way.

Since the end of the war in Vietnam, more than 60,000 people, many of them children, have been killed or injured by leftover explosives, particularly cluster bombs.

I recall our first "medical assessment:" two days at the Dong Ha General Hospital with American and Vietnamese volunteer physicians who saw at least 100 patients for referral treatment that we supported with funds raised from grassroots donors and later from charitable foundations.

Every trip we took moved us to raise more, and each year we helped more families with everything from emergency medical treatment and prostheses to vocational skills training and household productivity grants.

Pretty soon we added a support program for local medical providers and rounded up hand-me-down medical supplies and equipment for a dozen hospitals in the region and north of Hanoi.

Since those early days in 2000, Clear Path International has provided a wide range of services to more than 10,000 Vietnamese beneficiaries up and down the central coast, where much of the fighting took place.

Fortunately, we get fewer accident survivors every year, but the organization's work with the existing victims and families continues in the form of mostly economic support from which the households graduate when they're ready.

The whole idea is to prevent them from getting trapped in a downward financial and emotional spiral from which they can't recover.

For rural families, who barely get by fishing or farming in the mountains and along the coast where much of the ordnance is still encountered, an accidental explosion that injures or kills a family member is a catastrophe.

Since tradition requires at least one family member to accompany and feed the survivors at the hospital, care giving takes two productive members out of the household economy. Faced with medical bills for which they're not prepared, the families often borrow money and then remain indebted for years as they struggle to get back on top while caring for their disabled loved one.

Because of our holistic approach to survivor support, CPI has supported some families for many years. The organization's staff in Dong Ha are almost extended family to the households, some of which give back by mentoring new survivor families or paying back into the revolving livestock programs breeding pigs or raising fish.

It's important for an organization like CPI to continue this work, the funding for which comes from the U.S. State Department, U.S. grassroots donors and a charity in the Netherlands.

CPI is a U.S.-based organization, and helping the Vietnamese address the destructive legacy of a shared history is emotional and diplomatically healing. But because Vietnam has a growing economy and is no longer among the world's poorest developing nations, aid in general is drifting away from its shores, while new accidents continue to claim victims every year.