UXO

Again, if you are interested about more information (there's plenty of it) just type "UXO" and "Laos" in your search engine...
UXO stands for Unexploded Ordnances and describes a mainly unknown history: in the beginning of the 60s Laos was drawn into the Vietnam war. Between 1964 and 1973 the USA dropped an amount of bombs over this country which was bigger than what was dropped on Germany + Japan (together) in the Second World War. Many of these bombs were cluster bombs, and between 20 and 30 % of these bomblets (and also of the big bombs) did not explode. So the whole country is virtually littered with these unexploded big and small bombs ("bombies"). Every year several hundred people are killed, mostly children, who want to play with these neat-looking balls, or farmers, who dig up the ground and hit one of these bombs (more than 12000 since the end of the war)...
Phonsavan is the capital of Xieng Khouang province, the most heavily bombed region. There are a lot of bomb clearing activities carried out, and I managed to get access to one site. A team of deminers had found seven bombies and were going to blow them up... I will also have the possibility to go with a bomb clearing team from an other organisation, but they will resume their activities only in May... no problem, as I plan to come back to Laos for another two weeks...
As I said, there's a lot of information on the internet. I also will write an article about this issue, so if anyone is interested, I can pass on the text once it's finished (that means probably July, after my return). I also can highly recommend the documentary "Bombies", which was filmed and published in 2001. Maybe it's possible to download it from internet...
To give one last figure: with the present speed it will take around 100 years to "clean up" the whole country...