Erin Fredrichs Posts from Cambodia

Erin Fredrichs is traveling with CPI Co-founder Imbert Matthee through Asia. She sent in this report. She also took the photo.

In Cambodia, it won’t be the majesty of the many temples of Angkor Wat that will consume my memory once we return to the States. It will be the 17 kids I met at the Cambodia Landmine Museum.

Exhausted for the unforgiving heat and clamoring over the ruins of temples, we all packed in the car for our final stop on our list of touristy activities: the landmine museum. We drove down yet another dusty, pothole-laden Cambodian road and stopped in front of a cluster of huts guarded by a small boy. He granted us admission to the museum.

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Battambang Hospital, Cambodia

Clear Path Co-Founder Imbert Matthee is leading a group of CPI supporters across Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. He has filed this report.

My Cambodian friend Sary has been telling me for years that I should go visit the hospital in Battambang, the second-largest city in Cambodia. “They do not have anything,” he keeps saying while shaking his head. That’s followed by another statement along the same lines and a short laugh that implies I can’t possibly imagine how deprived this medical facility is. It wasn’t much of an exaggeration.

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Mine Survivor Phan Thong Kam

Clear Path Co-founder Imbert Matthee is leading a group of CPI supporters across Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. Photo by Erin Fredrichs.
Phan Thong Kam’s household grows rice to make a living. But the 39-year-old farmer from western Battambang Province who stepped on a landmine while taking some cows to wash at the lake, says it’s not enough to survive.

He lost his left leg above the knee and fragmentation injuries to the right leg make it hard for him to use it properly. He can only get around on crutches. His wife and 14-year-old son tend the rice fields on the family’s two-hectare plot (about 4.5 acres).

Kam himself does some mechanics, mostly futzing with motos. Occasionally, he can help fix the low berms framing the fields or transplant seedlings, but often he feels less than useful and he would welcome a chance to change that.

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The New Road Seemed Like a Good Idea

Clear Path Co-Founder Imbert Matthee is leading a group of CPI supporters across Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. He has filed this report. Photo by Erin Fredrichs.

At Clear Path, we say we pride ourselves in reaching out to landmine survivors. But what does that mean? Well, our group got a taste of it in Cambodia.

In our three project countries --Vietnam, Cambodia and on the Thai-Burma border -- it’s our staff or partner organization who work with the survivors on a daily basis.

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Effie Posts from Cambodia

Effie is a massage therapist travalling with Imbert Matthee, co-founder of CPI, across Vietnam Cambodia and Thailand. She posted this report. Photo by Erin Fredrichs.

On this trip, I’ve been searching for opportunities to work with landmine victims. I’ve wanted to help ease some of the physical and mental pain that remains long after their explosive accidents. We traveled to a small community center in the Bovel District of Cambodia. It is there we are met by three landmine-affected men, all have families, all are rice farmers. After the initial meeting, I ask, “Have you pain?”
“Yes,” they say. Their spines and femur bones hurt.
“May I help?” I ask, and indicate head and base of spine. They smile nervously, titter and tell us they want lunch first.

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The Group Reaches Cambodia

Clear Path Co-Founder Imbert Matthee is leading a group of CPI supporters across Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. He has filed this report.

The short, energetic and somewhat nervous man with the boyish grin points to a field where his uncle was caught fishing by the Khmer Rouge. They sent him to the jungle near the Thai border and within a few months, he was executed.

Everyone in Cambodia has a story that marks a memory from 30 years of torturous civil war.

This is the story of Savorn Singha, 38, born in Bovel district, Battambang Province when the first fighting started and still shell-shocked by the trauma he shares with the rest of his country. His story is an introduction to the part of Cambodia where Clear Path International and its Cambodian partner hope to start their next project in support of landmine accident survivors.

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Le Thuy, Quang Binh Province, Vietnam

Authored by CPI Co-founder Imbert Matthee.

When I was here in August, workmen were just starting to dig a foundation. Now, the new Le Thuy community-based physical rehabilitation training center has been completed. With the guidance of the center’s physical therapy nurse, several dozen disabled children use its equipment eagerly.

In one room, they pump the rowing machine and walk the thread mill. In the other, a teacher shows them how to exercise with weights. They are strengthening their muscles and, in some cases, relearning how to use their bodies.

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The Group Visits Nghia and the CPI School

Wolfgang Brolley is travelling with CPI co-founder Imbert Matthee and visiting CPI project sites in Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand

This morning we had the pleasure and pain of visiting brave Nghia ~the young lad that has lost both feet and his left hand to old, but horrifically viable ordinance (see video of Nghia here). His new, brilliant red wheelchair was parked outside his home’s entrance. Loss, pain, grief and brokenness line the life-worn face of his diminutive father -- just as painfully obvious is the inescapable and unaddressable loss of spirit. My heart broke as it does every time that I have the privilege of meeting one of our beneficiaries. The barren tragedy of such inappropriate and devastating injury ~all stemming from the natural curiosity of a young boy to open some shiny thing he finds~ wiped me out. I have no ability to reconcile that shortfall in the cosmic balance sheet – kids must have the right and freedom to PLAY! It is an accounting evidenced to be even more wildly out of whack when I squatted down next to the father to explain the importance to him of correct positioning and regular exercising of his son’s residual limbs. I patted his leg only to find that he too had a below knee amputation, and then I was told that his father (Nghia’s grandfather!) had been an amputee landmine survivor. Three generations of limb loss – all due to these sickening objects of destruction that remain so malevolently potent years longer than many human lives last in this beautiful country.

As our day wound down we breathed back in some of the reckless (as it should be) joy of kids being their totally unselfconscious, silly selves at the school that CPI made possible (in part by clearing 550 UXO out of three acres of land) near the CPI office in Dong Ha. Visiting last year, we found a sparkling, spanking new school – but it was empty and silent – we had been greeted by the lone and lonely caretaker. This year, the grounds bubbled over with young boys and girls swatting at each other with their hats, practicing their crazy kung-fu inspired rough-housing, and chasing whoever might be “it”, unless they were totally clowning for us and our way too inspiring cameras!

Every classroom was filled, the kids (until we opened the gates of visitor sanctioned bedlam) studious and immaculately well behaved. For me, this was true “swords into plowshares.” The school, the kids, and our group were all standing around not wasting too many thoughts on the fact that 4 years earlier one misstep could have cost any one of us a limb. Now, I couldn’t spy a single amputee in the crowd. That ~in this country~ is a beautiful thing.

May it ever be so.

Much love to all humanity,

wolfgang brolley

Imbert from Vietnam

Imbert Matthee is currently leading a trip of CPI supporters through Vietnam... he will be posting regularly... or so he promises!

I have stopped counting the number of trips I have made to Southeast Asia since we started Clear Path International five years ago. It's getting into the double digits. But that doesn't mean my annual journey to our project countries -- Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand (Burma) -- has become routine. Not by any means.

As on previous trips, I am blessed with the company of a handful of compadres equally passionate and interested about doing firsthand work with or on behalf of landmine accident survivors here. In addition to meeting the beneficiaries of our programs and seeing their recovery in progress, traveling with my compadres is the most rewarding and ever-enriching part of my regular returns to Southeast Asia.

I'd like you to meet them because for the next 17 days, they too will write blogs about our spring trip to one of the world's most heavily mine-affected regions of the world and share their daily experiences.

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