Land Mines - they are closer to home than I'd like

Sitting at the Conference on War Affected Children at the University of Winnipeg this morning, I thought back to one of the big reasons for the original conference in Winnipeg five years ago, which resulted in part from the movement to ban land mines – which were (and are) causing too much death and disability, too often of children. It was about two years after this that my wife was in Cambodia, nursing with an international group, for two weeks. She saw first hand, innocent people who were badly injured from land mines. Even today, there remain far too many land mines. And whenever I think of our daughter, her husband and their baby girl in Laos, I also think of the huge number of land mines still left in that country after the Vietnam war. Pauline, at least for the moment, is not in an area which is badly affected, but the land mines are always there, in the back of my mind when I think of Pauline, Roger and Grace in Laos. In the photo above, I am with Lloyd Axworthy, Alexandre Trudeau and Dr. Rey Pagtakhan at the War Affected Children Conference.