Landmines are dirty weapons. Designed to maim as much as to kill, these tools of war lurk just below the surface waiting to bring down an “enemy.” The problem is that armies can go home, but landmines stay behind long after the fighting has ended. Then the targets are children and other unsuspecting civilians whose encounter with these devices always ends badly.

By one astounding estimate, 40 people are injured or killed every day by landmines and unexploded ordinance (UXO). Do the math and it’s in the neighborhood of 15,000 per year. If that weren’t bad enough, the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty has been on the international agenda for 10 years with 40 countries refusing to sign including leading global citizens like the United States, Israel, India and China. C’mon, even Iraq and Afghanistan have managed to get it done.

So you can wait around for the world powers to get it together or you can begin to solve the problem yourself. Change Agents are wired to pursue the latter option.

Aki Ra is literally drawing on a lifetime of experience to reverse the landmine legacy of Cambodia. He is a former Khmer Rouge boy soldier whose objective is simple, yet the task is daunting: disarm as many of the estimated 4 million active landmines in Cambodia as possible and stop the tragedy that has left 20,000 people injured in his country between 1979 and 2005.

My wife and I were in Cambodia in 2006. We discovered that every Cambodian has two data points seared into their memory: the date the Khmer Rouge gained control of the country (April 17, 1975) and the precise length of their deadly reign (3 years, 8 months and 20 days).

Aki was conscripted to work in the Khmer Rouge army at age 5. Both his parents were murdered while he was taught to lay mines, fire guns, launch rockets and make bombs. By age 10, Ra was carrying an AK47 machine gun and actively fighting as a boy soldier in the Khmer Rouge army of orphans. Aki was captured by the Vietnamese four years later and forced to fight for six more years against remnants of the Khmer Rouge. A seasoned veteran by age 20, Ra was able to step up as a landmine specialist when the UN arrived in Cambodia in the early 1990s.

Aki’s commitment to changing the Cambodian landscape is without boundaries. Whether he is leveraging his military experience to remove mines, operating his Cambodia Landmine Museum, overseeing his school for young landmine victims or advocating internationally for the Mine Ban Treaty, Aki is a Change Agent who is drawing upon yesterday’s hardship to reshape Cambodia today.

My wife and I found Aki’s museum after following some battered signs down the back streets of Siem Reap. While there we saw him training Cambodian soldiers in de-mining activities. Super urgent and super cool. Some of our photos are in the photo gallery on this page along with a couple pics of his new museum which just opened this year.

Use the Action Pack in the upper right corner of this page to get behind Aki. You can also download the Landmine Monitor Report and affix your name to the People's Treaty for landmine elimination.

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