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"I have a beautiful voice, but my body is not whole," says singer Sovanreaksmey Kheng, who at age ten lost his right hand and eye in a detonator explosion. He is one of many land mine survivors in a nation on the mend.
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More than 1,600 mines have been removed from this area in Bour, a village in Cambodia's Battambang Province, where Hun Krat scans for buried devices. Villagers come here to cut grasses for roof thatch.
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Selected as Miss Landmine Cambodia 2009, Dos Sopheap tries on her prize, a titanium leg, with pageant organizer Morten Traavik. Although she later found the leg too uncomfortable to wear, her fame brought her sponsorship for college.
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Dos Sopheap, who won the 2009 Miss Landmine Cambodia pageant, is mobbed by her twin six-year-old sisters as her father, Ieng, smiles. In 1996 Dos Sopheap was the same age as her sisters when a land mine destroyed her leg as she visited her father, then a government soldier fighting against the Khmer Rouge.
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Aki Ra, founder of the Cambodia Landmine Museum, displays mines he defused. As a child he was forced by the Khmer Rouge to plant some of the same types of mines.
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At 14, Getu lost his left foot and had his right leg shattered by a mine while herding cows in Myanmar. Four months later, after infection set in, he was taken to Mae Sot Hospital in Thailand for treatment.
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At a Battambang hospital, an x-ray of a child's amputated legs shows that his bones are still growing, making it painful for him to wear a prosthesis.
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It takes explosives to destroy explosives. Technicians in Kampong Chhnang inspect charges made by melting down stockpiled and recovered munitions and recasting them to blow up mines and unexploded remnants of war still in the ground. Circular casings from antitank devices will be sent to a scrap yard for recycling.
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In a sign of Cambodia's renewal, a villager from Sneung ventures into a recently cleared marsh to fish, once a life-threatening pursuit.
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Mosha was seven months old when a mine took her leg. Still growing at four, she's measured at a Thai animal hospital for a new prosthetic, essential since elephants carry so much of their weight on their forelegs.
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Visitors to a bar pay to have fish clean dead skin from their feet while musicians, some missing legs, play for tourists in Siem Reap. As reminders of a painful past, mine survivors often face discrimination.
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A doctor at Mae Sot Hospital in Thailand delicately removes a bandage to inspect damage to the eyes of a Burmese man who was blasted while cutting bamboo in a forest.
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Students at an elementary school in Battambang Province learn life-and-limb-saving rules by arranging cartoons in the best order to illustrate the hazards of land mines. Most sequences end with a fireball.
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To reach the schoolyard outhouse in O Khmum, a boy takes a safe path between buildings. Students must take the path because there are suspected minefields around the school in the area where the shrubs and trees start.
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San Mao, a ten-kilometer race champion, gets ready for a training run in his Phnom Penh neighborhood. To support his family, he works as a motorcycle taxi driver in the capital. But he gets his joy from running.
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San Mao was kidnapped by the Khmer Rouge and made to work as an ammunition carrier when he was 15 years old. While foraging for food, the boy triggered a mine that took part of his right leg. Now 40 and married to another land mine survivor, he is pictured here with his seven-year-old daughter, Regina.
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Shooting hoops at the relief center where he has lived for three years, Din Socheat was 15 when, working in his uncle's rice field, he picked up what he thought was a ball. In fact, it was a cluster bomblet. It blew off his left arm and most of the fingers on his right hand. Socheat wants to become a teacher so he can share lessons on "the danger of land mines."
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Chhin Boreak, 19, lost his right arm to a land mine at the age of 10. One of 12 children in his family, he came to live at the relief center in northwest Cambodia founded by mine removal expert Aki Ra for kids and young adults whose families can't care for them. "It is my ambition to become a tour guide so I can teach tourists about my country's history," Boreak says. "I especially love the carvings on the temples and the stories they tell."
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