De-miners search for safer, faster, better tools

Twenty thousand times every year, a landmine kills someone. Twenty percent are children. But the tragedy doesn’t stop there. Thousands more are injured. Families mourn. Children fear to play. Farmers cannot farm. …

An operator uses a remote control to test Digger mine-elimination equipment.

The Kiwanis International Foundation is helping the Kiwanis Club of L’Erguel, Switzerland, de-mine battlefields. The foundation awarded the club a grant to help develop, test, and manufacture a new generation of mine-clearance equipment. The Erguel club is working with Digger DTR, a humanitarian de-mining organization. Two Swiss Kiwanis clubs have raised US$25,000 for the project.

“The de-mining machines not only protect victims from mines, they also allow the land to return to a safe, decontaminated condition for all of the population to enjoy,” the club wrote in its grant application to the Kiwanis International Foundation. “People can live normally, and the number of saved children increases by the thousands.”

A Digger vehicle currently is exploding mines in southern Sudan.