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| Jonsons Family- Recently Uganda |
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In the Rwenzori Mountains region of western Uganda the Johnson family once lived happily, that is until the war shattered their lives and drove them from their farm into an IDP camp.
The Johnson family had five children. After leaving the IDP camp in which they were living, when the war had finished, they moved to a host community near to their own village.
Eventually, due to land pressure, they decided to move back to their home in order to repair it and get on with their lives, living and farming as they once did. Whilst the parents carried out the repairs their children played, as so many love to do with thoughts of a better life ahead.
Suddenly moments later there was an explosion, the parents rushed to see the cause, it was their children, three of which lay dead, the youngest two maimed, from the evidence recovered at the scene the item which killed the children was an M79 sub munition.
"It looks like a little bell"!! |
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| Guernsey Press Article School of death |
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Mines Awareness Trust saved 1.200 children from possible death after finding a record haul of bombs in an Eritrean School yard.
MAT's director of operations Guernseyman, Ben Remfrey, was on a management visit to the country when he monitored a radio report about a child injured in an explosion.
He went to the school to oversee the investigation technique of his team and was horrified by what he saw.
"There where 3000 fused bombs above and below ground level".
"I couldn't believe my eyes at what I saw" he said.
"Throughout the schoolyard, everywhere I looked, were bombs, mortar bombs and antitank rockets", said Mr Remfrey.
"I was shocked that the whole place hadn't gone up. How that whole school hadn't ended up 400ft in the air and all of the 1,200 kids with it I don't know".
When Mr Remfrey arrived at the school, which is the size of a modest primary school, they found that two children had been injured.
One of them, six years old, had had his hand blown off by, what we now believe to have been, a fuse.
"I immediately taped the place off and got the all kids out, my team arrived with their tents and set up camp just outside the school. They spent a week educating the kids and the villagers about the threat posed by bombs" said Mr Remfrey.
"We brought in the Danish De-mining Group (DDG) an NGO we get on with very well, they were as shocked as we were. It's taken them from, until now (May to July), to actually clear the area with two bomb- disposal teams". The school, which was built there nearly 10 years ago, was build of a former army munitions base. Mr Remfrey said that "no one could understand why it had not disappeared into the hole in the ground".
Because the total lack of awareness and resources out there, the local community build the school on the army base site. "It was like an out-of body experience that these people would build a primary school there", he said.
"If one of these items in this confined space were to have exploded, it is possible the whole school could have been destroyed".
"When we explained what we'd found to the teachers suddenly it dawned on them, but the head master said he'd asked the local authorities to do something on two-to-three previous occasions, when various children were maimed, and they'd done nothing" said Mr Remfrey.
"While I was marking the areas off, I just walked round the site and I was completely lost for words. I've never seen anything like it anywhere in the world" commented Mr Remfrey. |
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