Museum like no other
It's a "heavy" day. First S21, next the fields, and then on to the voluntary landmine museum in Siem Reap. Not to be confused with the government run War museum, Aki Ra established this humble and humbling display.
It was not immediately apparent to us, as the bus pulls to a stop, that we have reached our destination. The museum looks very much like a huddle of private rural huts with perhaps off-caste metal tools lying strewn and rusting around the yard. But upon close inspection we find the rusty piles of implements are actually tools of death rather than idle farming gear.
On the walls of the hut hang dozens-upon-dozens of tatty newspaper articles about the clearing of mines - many referring to Mr Aki Ra.
Once a child soldier laying explosive ordinances, Aki now dedicated his life to demining the Cambodian countryside and adopting children maimed by landmines. He has turned his skills to digging up some the ten million explosive weapons buried all over this country.
Aki disarms a couple of things every week, and brings them back to this farmyard and bamboo shack that doubles for a museum. He melts the TNT out of them and puts them on display.
Laced with irony, one article one display quotes Akira as saying he has spent the first half of his life planting bombs everywhere and the second half digging them up. He has disarmed "hundreds, maybe thousands" of bombs that he himself originally planted.
Also on show in the hut is a video of how to disarm an anti-personnel mine (just in case you ever need to know. It's important to remember that the mine itself might be booby trapped - perhaps holding down the lever on a grenade underneath).
It was not immediately apparent to us, as the bus pulls to a stop, that we have reached our destination. The museum looks very much like a huddle of private rural huts with perhaps off-caste metal tools lying strewn and rusting around the yard. But upon close inspection we find the rusty piles of implements are actually tools of death rather than idle farming gear.
On the walls of the hut hang dozens-upon-dozens of tatty newspaper articles about the clearing of mines - many referring to Mr Aki Ra.
Once a child soldier laying explosive ordinances, Aki now dedicated his life to demining the Cambodian countryside and adopting children maimed by landmines. He has turned his skills to digging up some the ten million explosive weapons buried all over this country.
Aki disarms a couple of things every week, and brings them back to this farmyard and bamboo shack that doubles for a museum. He melts the TNT out of them and puts them on display.
Laced with irony, one article one display quotes Akira as saying he has spent the first half of his life planting bombs everywhere and the second half digging them up. He has disarmed "hundreds, maybe thousands" of bombs that he himself originally planted.
Also on show in the hut is a video of how to disarm an anti-personnel mine (just in case you ever need to know. It's important to remember that the mine itself might be booby trapped - perhaps holding down the lever on a grenade underneath).
posted by Unknown at 2:35 PM
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