Life of the Land

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They stand to attention in neat rows, soldiers battling an invisible yet deadly enemy. At the fore, clad in military fatigues, is Aki Ra, all eyes on his cherubic face as he issues the day's instructions. Upon dismissal, the team dons Kevlar vests and begins the laborious process of chopping back vegetation and delicately prodding wherever the telltale, high-pitched whine of the metal detector betrays something beneath the dank soil. Often it's a piece of shrapnel — a remnant of decades of savage conflict. But sometimes, a hockey-puck-size antipersonnel land mine is discovered and destroyed with a controlled explosion. Cambodia was once blighted by up to 6 million land mines — indiscriminate weapons that brook no distinction between marauding combatant and inquisitive child. Made largely in the USSR and China, they were used by Cambodia's once warring factions, including the notorious Khmer Rouge, to impede their enemies. Aki Ra has dedicated his life to curing this subterranean plague. About 20 years ago, armed with just rudimentary tools — a pocket knife, pliers, a stick — he set about single-handedly removing land mines and unexploded ordnance from his homeland's verdant quilt of paddy fields and lush jungle. Aki Ra says from 1992 to 2007 he personally cleared about 50,000 mines. The human cost of this scourge becomes apparent to any visitor to Cambodia — the pockmarked nation has an estimated 40,000 amputees. Today, Aki Ra's NGO, Cambodian Self Help Demining (CSHD), funded by foreign governments and private donations, works with a team of around 30, mainly in the country's north, where the majority of mines remain. "I want to make my country safe for my people," says Aki Ra. (PHOTOS: International Mine Action Day) His life and cause reflect the suffering Cambodia has undergone. Aki Ra thinks he was born in 1970, but cannot be sure, as his parents were among the more than 1 million Cambodians slaughtered in the Khmer Rouge's killing fields. He was conscripted into the Khmer Rouge at age 10 — first to cook, hunt and wash clothes