Contemplating environmental hazards to your health:
Having spent the last four hours climbing up and down the mountaintop-temple that has been the destination of this trip, having taken hundreds of pictures, I am exhausted from the tropical mountain-sun and sit down on a wall at the stairs that twelve hundred or-so years ago were built for pilgrims to climb. Behind me, maybe two dozen meters into the bushes, there is red tape and several signs warning of mines. Further up the slope is a blue sign about a cleared minefield. The Cambodians put up those blue signs everywhere. Every party-member has one at their house. Everywhere where there has been foreign aid there is one, usually proclaiming with a flag who did what for them. Korea built this school. The European Disaster Relief Fund dug this well. ZOA provided this medicare-center. The Hodgess-Family from New York built this family home. The German government financed this provincial police station. And then this: This minefield was cleared with funds from the French government. The cleared area encompasses 4313 square meters of steeply sloped jungle. 612 mines were disarmed, as were 7 unexploded pieces of ordinance. I sit next to it and do the math. Back in my army days I learned that a clearing-quote of 95% in land mines is decent enough. That would mean that there are still around 30 land mines in that patch of jungle. 15 for an area as big as my family-yard in Hamburg used to be. Yet, the mines are a very abstract danger to me. I sit there, contemplating them. Guess I just shouldn't go off the paths and roads then, huh?
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