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 I was one of those Sally Struthers' babies in the Christian Children's Fund brochures, a young child running around my village in Laos, barefoot and naked, playing in the rice paddies. One afternoon I was playing by a pond when I spotted a water snake swimming toward me hissing, as if delivering a message. Running away, heart thumping, I heard a distant buzzing sound from above.
I saw an airplane and a small voice told me that one day I would ride that iron eagle to America--a place my sister Samountha had moved to some years before. I was probably 6 years old. That was almost 29 years ago. It seems the water snake's prophecy came to pass.
I am an adult now, a gay man living in the United States. I have come to believe I was sent to this country for a reason--to help with efforts to erase the legacies of war that the U.S. left behind in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War-era. For Laos, this effort is focused on the removal of unexploded ordnance (UXO), including over 80 million unexploded cluster bomblets as well as large bombs, rockets, mortars, and land mines.
This is a humanitarian issue, a social justice issue, and a compelling human rights issue on par with LGBT rights.
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South Eastern Asia 
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