The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

I had a visit from an old friend recently. He came all the way from Viet- nam.

Some of you may recall how just a few years ago, I wrote a series of articles for this page about the work of Clear Path International (www.cpi.org). I co-founded this organization with three friends from Bainbridge Island and Vermont. It's mis- sion to help survivors of land mine accidents.

For nine years, I was involved in the creation, development and growth of CPI until I left the western part of the state to come to Waitsburg. My wife Karen continued to carry the torch for a while and even had a little fundraiser at Jim and Claire Johnston's Heaven on Main Street.

Some of you came and supported the cause very generously, so I thought you might like to hear the story of my friend's visit and the news he brought with him.

When we began the or- ganization, we had a special project in the lowlands of central Vietnam, just south of the former Demilitarized Zone where unexploded ordnance was strewn every- where and kids and farmers were killed or injured almost daily.

We had a large grant to clear 110 acres of land of this dangerous debris. Ironically and symbolically, the loca- tion was an old U.S. military base that supported artillery units all along the DMZ. The provincial government of Quang Tri wanted to build homes there for low-income residents of Dong Ha.

This is where I first met my friend Chi Hong Tran. The American demining team with whom we contracted had hired him as the local coordinator and we quickly became good friends.

While we and several European mine clearance groups were busy making the grounds near Dong Ha more safe for habitation, local families would come to us, pleading to visit their homes and meet relatives who had been injured by cluster bomb or phosphorous explosions.

It was heartbreaking be- cause no one was helping them. No one had the funding. As this went on, we de- cided we needed to add victim assistance to our mission and once we did, we began to raise money for our work from private-sector donors.

So big was the need in Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia that this became our predominant focus. With support from different donors interested in different countries, we set up recovery and rehabilita- tion programs next door in Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar and, eventually Laos and Afghanistan.

But despite support from several large foundations and the U.S. State Department's Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement, our reach in Vietnam remained limited to the central coast region. The dream Chi and I had always had before I left CPI in 2009, was an emergency response program for all of Vietnam from the Mekong delta in the south to the Chinese border in the north.

And that was the good news Chi brought with him from Vietnam while he vis- ited the CPI office on Bain- bridge Island last week. With funding from the State Department and approval from the central government in Hanoi, CPI has finally man- aged to offer help to anyone injured by a land mine or UXO accident in Vietnam.

Chi and I looked at each other after he broke the news to me at a CPI dinner and our reaction was almost giddy. For so long, we had wanted this and now finally, there is some way for someone who suffered from such a catastrophic event to get help anywhere in the far-flung Vietnamese countryside.

To put this in perspec- tive, leftover unexploded ordnance has claimed more than 100,000 victims in Vietnam since the end of the war in 1975. Forty thousand of them were killed and 66,000 were injured as a result of this hidden peacetime scourge.

With all the explosives still out there, it's almost impossible for us or anyone to prevent accidents. But at least, we can now be pres- ent when the victims need help the most and help them recover.