U.S. Assistance Helps Develop a Mine Action Professional in Cambodia

Ms. Sophary Sophin was born in 1987 in a small village outside of Siem Reap during a period of civil war in Cambodia. As a young girl, she and her family had to evade Khmer Rouge fighters every evening, sometimes taking refuge in another village and sometimes floating in the water to hide. The sides of the path she walked to school were littered with antivehicle mines; a neighbor’s family lost a son and a husband to an anti-vehicle mine explosion. Her childhood experience motivated her to work on demining and she “jumped into this sector with no doubt.” She started by working in the office of Cambodian Self Help Demining (CSHD), an NGO funded in part by the United States. When CSHD founder Aki Ra and his wife took Ms. Sophary to see the work in the minefield and the demining team showed her how to wear the protective clothes, safely enter the minefield, and use the demining tools, she felt “very happy and excited.” She did not tell her family or friends that she had started demining in the field. Later, when they found out, they told her to quit the job because of the danger. She said, “My family and friends thought I was crazy.”

Now after more than nine years at CSHD, Ms. Sophary has risen up in the organization and taken on increasing responsibilities: managing a demining team’s operations and resources for maximum efficiency, effectiveness, and safety. She develops annual work and budget plans, presents them to donors, and reports on CSHD’s work to all stakeholders (donors and Cambodian central and local authorities). She has had to work hard to overcome bias against her as a young female, succeeding due both to education and to her honest and likeable personality. She paid her own way through high school and university with a restaurant job and extremely frugal living, completing her bachelor’s degree in accounting, and entering a program for a master’s degree in management, and becoming certified on EOD. She loves fighting the “haunting killer” of mines and UXO and making villagers “feel safe in their mind and body.”

Ms. Sophary aspires to expand the CSHD program, get more women involved, and one day help other countries afflicted by landmines. With her job and modest lifestyle, she has been able to pay her family’s debts, send her younger brother to university, take care of her parents, and help seven cousins from poor villages finish high school. Her dream is to raise the quality of education in Cambodia to the level of any developed country and perhaps enter politics to serve her country more.

Ms. Sophary, Cambodian Self Help Demining/Landmine Relief Fund’s Operations Manager who supervises demining and EOD teams, gives a briefing on landmines and UXO.

Photo courtesy of Cambodian Self Help Demining.