April 4th is the International Mine Awareness Day and Bamboo and Fat Panda’s are joining the cause! Up until then, we will be fundraising to help support four amazing groups working in mine action here in Cambodia.

After decades of war, Cambodia is developing and growing at an incredible rate. Unfortunately, much of the country still has the legacy of war hindering said development; land mines. Many factions were laying landmines and there were no records or maps kept as to where they were buried but the majority being along the Cambodian-Thai border. Since 1991, approximately half have been destroyed but it remains one of the most mine affected countries in the world with over 64,000 casualties recorded since 1979 and over 25,000 amputees.

There are four groups that are based in Siem Reap that are all doing incredible work to clear minefields across the country, opening up land for farming, the development of infrastructure and protecting the people living and working there. They are separate entities but work in cooperation with a common goal so to reflect this, we are raising funds for all four.

The HALO Trust

HALO was the first organization to respond to Cambodia’s landmine problem in 1991. We have over 1,100 national staff working in the provinces of Battambang, Banteay Meanchey, Otdar Meanchey, Siem Reap, Pursat and Pailin. To date, HALO alongside other international operators and the national capacity CMAC, have cleared over 50% of Cambodia’s minefields. We recruit and train female and male deminers from the mine-affected districts so that the landmine contaminated communities are part of the clearance process as well as ensuring donor funding, in the form of salaries, reaches some of the most marginalised communities in Cambodia. https://www.halotrust.org/where-we-work/south-asia/cambodia/

Cambodia Self Help Demining

Cambodia Self-Help Demining was officially founded in 2007 by Aki Ra, a Khmer man and former child soldier.

CSHD works in “low priority” villages throughout the Kingdom of Cambodia with a group of approximately 25 deminers. These brave men and women put their lives on the line 25 days out of every month while demining.

Aki Ra began demining on his own in the 1990’s working with a stick and a pair of pliers to disarm each individual mine. He cleared nearly 50,000 all on his own.

http://www.cambodianselfhelpdemining.org/

Norwegian People’s Aid

NPA’s presence in Cambodia dates from 1992 with the first deminers deployed to the North-West under UN auspices. This marked Norwegian People’s Aids first Humanitarian Disarmament intervention ever.

NPA has released more than 34 million (m²) (the size of 6,353 football fields) of suspected land for safe use to date.

Over 44,000 people have been reported to have been injured by mines/ERW in Cambodia; the numbers are likely to be greater. http://www.npaid.org/Our-Work/Countries-we-work-in/Asia/Cambodia/Humanitarian-Disarmament-in-Cambodia NPA also operates using Mine Detection Dogs. These brilliant dogs are trained to sniff out explosives and can survey land without the use of a lead meaning that they can cover a lot of ground. They have a wonderful reputation for the wellbeing and health of the dogs.

APOPO

The APOPO scent detection rats, nicknamed 'HeroRATs', help to rid the world of landmines and tuberculosis –returning safe land back to communities for development. In April 2015, APOPO sent its mine detection rats (MDR) outside of the African continent for the first time to Cambodia following successful mine clearance projects in Angola and Mozambique. The MDR teams are implemented to support existing conventional demining CMAC teams in order to speed up clearance operations in Cambodia. https://www.apopo.org/en/what-we-do/detecting-landmines-and-explosives/where-we-work/cambodia

The work that all four of these organisations are doing is awe inspiring and we would not be able to live and travel here without their hard work. We are happy to be joining with them to hopefully get closer to a world without landmines.