Teaching kids in Vietnam to avoid a deadly, everyday legacy of war

Nguyen Thanh Phu delivers a presentation to children on the dangers of active land mines and bombs in Dong Ha, Vietnam.

Their teacher is Nguyen Thanh Phu, the manager at the Mine Action Visitor Center in Quang Tri's provincial capital, Dong Ha. 

He's good with the kids — making a game of the presentation to keep them interested. And keeping them interested is serious business.

"It's a life skill," he says. Children have to be aware of how to identify and avoid unexploded ordnance — like learning how to ride a bike or crossing the street.

Quang Tri was the most heavily bombed province of the Vietnam War, says Chuck Searcy of Project Renew, which runs the center. As much as 10% of those munitions didn't detonate, according to the Pentagon.

"Four decades later, it is still a threat in heavy concentrations in certain parts of the country, Quang Tri being the worst," Searcy says. "The ordnance is still active, lethal and will still blow your arm or leg off or kill you, and these kids are especially vulnerable."

Which is why Project Renew, in cooperation with local schools, runs awareness workshops for students from all over the province. They're quick learners. Fourth-grader Huy Nguyen says he knows exactly what to do if he sees unexploded ordnance in a ditch or the garden — or the schoolyard.

"Every day, these teams operating all over the province get five or 10 calls a day," he says. "Our teams safely destroy 200 to 300 munitions in a week. So it's an ongoing problem. It will continue. But it can be managed."

Searcy remembers a time in the mid-1990s when it was difficult to get U.S.-based donors interested in helping here. The war was still too fresh in the minds of many back home. And in Vietnam, too.

"I've been here a long time and it's been a frustrating process at times, and sometimes not very hopeful," he says.

But in the past year or so, Searcy says, there's been a sea change. Earlier, his group would be lucky to get a few hundred thousand dollars a year from the U.S. government to help fund its work. But in the past year, the spigot has opened. The State Department, he says, recently gave nearly US$8 million for Project Renew's partner, Norwegian People's Aid, and even more for several other ordnance-disposal groups working in Quang Tri.

"It's been a long time coming, but the US government is now fully engaged in dealing with these efforts," he says. "In fact, now the US government is the biggest donor in supporting cleanup efforts to rid Vietnam of the bomb and mine threat. And there's greater cooperation between all organizations and with the Vietnamese government than ever before."