It was an ordinary day that turned into tragedy. Sone was walking home with her young boy in their village in Lao PDR. They had been buying biscuits in the local shop. Hand in hand, they saw a large cloud of smoke. She ran home to find the house in flames and her husband dead. A bomb dropped almost 50 years ago that he had collected as scrap metal had exploded. 

Overnight, Sone became the family breadwinner. Her daughter dropped out of school to help. When they found more unexploded ordnance in their field, clearance operations meant her entire cassava crop would have to be uprooted. She waited until after the harvest. She says that starvation was a bigger threat than the bombs. “My children are still young, and I needed money to feed my family,” she says.

In Viet Nam, Nguyen watched every year as her house was flooded. Her family lived in the lowlands because the hills remained contaminated by explosives 50 years after the end of the Second Indochina War. “I had to take my belongings, children, and the cow to friends or family until the flooding passed,” she says.

Millions of people like Sone and Nguyen are forced into the difficult position of taking risks to survive. UNDP has worked with the Government of Viet Nam clear 9,000 hectares of land in Nguyen’s area so she has been able to relocate. In Lao PDR, UNDP has helped villages like Sone’s by working with local institutions on surveying, clearance, risk education and victim assistance. As of March 2024, over 1.9 million pieces of unexploded ordnance have been destroyed in the country.