Above and Beyond

By saving the pashmina goat, Babar Afzal hopes to rescue an 
entire people

The goats scatter, seeking out foliage to nibble across the rocky terrain of Ladakh, an inhospitable part of India’s Jammu and Kashmir state hard on the Himalayan mountains. Two ethnic Changpa goatherds greet a trio of outside visitors with a friendly juleh—hello in Ladakhi. Their hands busily circling Buddhist prayer beads, they listen as 38-year-old Babar Afzal asks questions, takes notes and explains the Pashmina Goat Project he established in 2012.

Indian pashmina, better known as cashmere, is a highly prized wool. It’s six times thinner than human hair and can cost several thousand dollars on the international market when turned into a single scarf. But the nomadic Changpas, most of whom are poor and illiterate, don’t see much of that money. Middlemen buy the raw pashmina wool for anything from $40 to $80 a kilogram and sell it for up to five times more. “There’s so much struggle in our lives,” says goatherd Tsering Dolma, 39, waving her rough hands at the shabby tent where her 3-year-old son roams in threadbare clothes. “Why would we want our children to continue in this trade?”

Babar believes he has the answer. His Pashmina Goat Project brings together more than 8,000 ethnic Changpa goatherds, some 1.5 million of their livestock and about 300,000 weavers into a cooperative whose aim is empowerment. The co-op educates the Changpas about the worth of their flocks, helps them negotiate better deals for their wool, and informs them about the increasingly erratic weather patterns that hurt the well-being of their goats. “The pashmina ecosystem is a storehouse of ancient culture and religious practices,” says Babar. “It’s important that this community flourish.”

The plight of the Changpas partly reflects that of Kashmir. The region, divided into Jammu and Kashmir on India’s side and Azad Kashmir on Pakistan’s, has been hotly disputed by the two countries since 1947. Besides the face-off between two bristling armies—already three wars have been fought over the territory—Jammu and Kashmir is subject to attacks by Islamic and separatist insurgents. In 1996, Babar left his birthplace of Jammu, the state’s winter capital, for New Delhi, joining thousands of other young Kashmiris desperate to escape a web of militancy and unemployment. After graduating in business management, he worked as a consultant for multinationals like McKinsey & Co. in India and overseas. But he couldn’t get Kashmir out of his mind. “I wanted to be back home,” he says. “The pull was strong.”

Since he returned to Jammu with his wife and daughter in 2008, Babar has been running restaurants and businesses promoting local food and handicrafts. He also spotlights the impact of climate change through his abstract art: paintings, mugs, even iPhone covers. “Climate change is Kashmir’s biggest problem, even worse than terrorism,” he says.

Ladakh’s goats, which grow to nearly a meter high and typically live about seven years, produce 80% of India’s pashmina. In recent years, however, supplies have dwindled as the weather changed. Ladakh’s Changtang plateau, which extends into neighboring Tibet, has long been a frosty wasteland where temperatures plunge to –30°C. Though hardy, more than 22,000 pashmina goats starved to death in 2012 because of an unusually harsh winter—more than a meter of snow fell instead of the normal 2 or 3 cm. “The horrific sight of thousands of dead goats and bewildered Changpas haunted me for months,” says Babar.

From this nadir was born the Pashmina Goat Project. Babar holds workshops to educate the goatherds about the exclusivity of pashmina and the consumer market, and how to deal with international buyers directly. They are also taught to add value by spinning the wool into fabric themselves, and will soon sell their own pashmina products through a knitwear brand called Village Pashmina. “If we asked for more money, the traders laughed at us because we had nowhere else to go,” says Sonam Dorjee, a Changpa. “Now we do.”

Babar also campaigns against pashmina that is spun by machines—as opposed to handlooms—and mixed with excessive low-quality wool. He hosts events, fashion shows and fair-trade expos countrywide to promote handspun material. The next phase will be mobile software that sends weather alerts to goatherds, so they can avoid storms and map safer migration routes. “[Babar’s] is the first voice speaking up for the poor and marginalized in the Himalayas,” says Pankaj Chandan, a regional head of WWF-India.

While Jammu and Kashmir has been largely peaceful since 2004, sporadic clashes between India and Pakistan—most recently in October—as well as occasional attacks by militants mean outside investment is virtually nonexistent. India produces only about 1% of the world’s pashmina supply—worth just $160 million a year—compared with neighboring China’s 70%. Babar hopes that by lifting their lives and livelihoods, the Changpa goatherds can also boost the region’s fortunes. “The [Changpa] community is not capable of fighting this battle on its own,” he says. Like the goats he strives to protect, Babar is tenacious to the end.

Yi Jiefang draws strength from a 
 personal loss to help make China 
a greener place

Almond orchards once bloomed in Kulun, a parched county in China’s northern Inner Mongolia region. Villagers remember the orchards as lush and white, with petals that fell like snowflakes. When Yi Jiefang first visited Kulun in 2001, she was captivated by the thought of the now absent groves. The image reminded her of springtime in Japan, where she had lived for decades and raised her son. After he died in a motorcycle accident the year before, at the age of just 22, Yi left Tokyo and returned to China, bereft. She wanted to do something to honor the young environmentalist’s memory. He loved trees, so she decided to plant.

At the time Kulun County was under siege, its small farms swamped by waves of sand from the Gobi Desert. The sand swallowed land and seeped into the threadbare hotel room Yi had turned into a temporary base. Too late for orchards, the farmers told her—the earth was too far gone. “It’s like a body,” says Yi, now 65. “You can’t bring it back to life.”

For more than a decade, though, she has done little else but try. Using the money from her son’s insurance claim, she founded a nonprofit called Green Life that is dedicated to planting trees. Her first few seasons were disastrous: saplings shriveled and were blown away by harsh, dry winds. She was frustrated but pushed ahead; she needed a project big enough to distract her from her gnawing grief.

For an office worker from Shanghai, Kulun was an education. The region was once grassland and home to nomadic herders. As the population grew, an ever greater area was cleared to make way for agriculture. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s disastrous attempt to quickly modernize China’s economy in the late 1950s, peasants used scarce foliage to stoke the fires that turned scrap metal to steel. Now factories and water-sucking coal plants dot the landscape, and experts worry that climate change will reduce rainfall, compounding Kulun’s woes.

It’s a story playing out across China. More than three decades of rapid development have wreaked havoc on the environment. Unchecked industrialization has tainted the country’s air, earth and water, threatening both the economy and public health. The World Bank estimates that environmental degradation and resource depletion cost China 9% of its gross national income in 2008. A Global Burden of Disease study published by the Lancet found that air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010. In many parts of northern China, dirty air blankets cities in a soupy smog, turning day to night.

Desertification is a huge factor. Northern China’s toxic air is thickened with sand. In 2011, China’s State Forestry Administration estimated that over 27% of the country—some 2.6 million sq km—was undergoing desertification, affecting about 400 million people. In 2013 a weeks-long spell of extreme air pollution—dubbed the “airpocalypse” in English—spurred official promises to double down on the pollution fight. China spends about $13 billion a year on tree-planting, including an initiative known as the Great Green Wall. Launched in 1978 and slated to continue until 2050, it aims to plant nearly 36 million hectares of trees across 4,500 km of northern China, theoretically thwarting the desert’s southward march.

Yi sees her work as an extension of this vision. She splits her time between her home in Shanghai, where Green Life has a small office, and Inner Mongolia, where she works with the local government, forestry experts and villagers, as well as volunteers who fly in from across China and around the world. Their efforts are supported by corporate donors as well as private grants, including several from parents who, like Yi, have lost a child. In Kulun the effort has yielded tidy rows of poplar or pine. They are not as elegant as almond orchards, but the oldest trees are straight and tall. The youngest are tiny and windblown, sticks bobbing on a sea of sand. Yi inspects them with the pride of a new mom. “These ones are the youngest!” she says. “Come, look at this!”

Tree-planting has its critics. Researchers note that many trees die, and dust storms persist. Jiang Gaoming, an ecologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, once likened tree-planting to the story of the emperor with no clothes—as in nobody wants to say it won’t work. Studies have spotlighted the dangers of plantations with just one kind of tree as they lack biodiversity and are more vulnerable to disease. Researchers worry, too, that thirsty roots may further deplete groundwater. Some even wonder if it would be better to do nothing and let the ecosystem recover naturally. Yi disagrees. Such a program is often a matter of trial and error, she says, and Green Life is now experimenting with native shrubs. Besides, says Yi, tree-planting raises environmental awareness.

The work is hard, but she sticks to it for those moments of grace when she feels close to her son amid the trees. After a long day touring sites near Kulun, we stop the car. The scene is otherworldly: white, rippling dunes framed by fading light. To one side is her fledgling forest, to the other, a stark expanse of scrub and sand. Says Yi, smiling, her eyes wet: “Isn’t it beautiful?” —With reporting by Gu Yongqiang / Kulunn

Cynthia Maung’s simple border 
clinic is a lifesaver for Burma’s 
downtrodden

Lay Lay doesn’t yet have a name for her baby boy. The 23-year-old homemaker gave birth after a grueling eight-hour labor, having made the trip to Thailand alone from the Burmese town of Myawaddy. “I was scared to have my baby at home, as I didn’t have money for a doctor,” she says. “The doctors here made me feel safe.”

Lay Lay’s plight is a side effect of the world’s longest-running civil war, between Burma’s military and local ethnic rebel armies. The conflict has racked Burma, also known as Myanmar, for over half a century. Bloodshed and bitter poverty have claimed thousands of lives, destroyed infrastructure and forced more than 2 million refugees and migrant workers to eke out a better existence in comparatively booming neighbor Thailand.

This forsaken community has precious few options for health care, making the Mae Tao clinic, the free medical facility where Lay Lay gave birth, a lifesaver. Established by Dr. Cynthia Maung near the Thai border town of Mae Sot, Mae Tao treats more than 150,000 patients each year, including some 3,000 newborns—equivalent to a typical U.S. maternity ward.

But there are no gleaming floors or sterile hand-gel dispensers. Instead, a ramshackle collection of lichen-imbued concrete and wire huts is set amid a packed earth garden of calathea and palm. Patients lie on hard wooden or iron cots covered with mats or, if lucky, a thin mattress. Red spatters of betel juice mark the dusty courtyard.

It’s a testament to Burma’s woes that for so many of its people, Mae Tao represents the apex of medical care—and that the nation’s most famous doctor has lived in exile for a quarter-century. Dr. Cynthia, as she is affectionately known, was born in Burma’s then capital of Rangoon in 1959 but grew up just outside the sodden city of Moulmein to the south. After completing her medical studies, the ethnic Karen began working as a rural doctor and was constantly confronted by the hardships of ordinary people.

In 1988, student-led pro-democracy demonstrations convulsed the nation, only to be brutally quashed by the junta. Thousands died, and many more fled through the dense jungle to the relative safety of Thailand. Dr. Cynthia joined these bedraggled hordes, administering medical care as best she could despite the scarcity of equipment and medication. The next year, she and a few colleagues set up Mae Tao using supplies begged from missionaries and aid workers. At the outset, the clinic’s meager cache of instruments was sterilized in an aluminum rice cooker.

“We were just emergency medical relief in the conflict zone,” says Dr. Cynthia, attired in a traditional striped Karen tunic. “We were responding to the needs of new arrivals and never expected to stay on the border this long.” Over the next quarter of a century, Burma’s crisis festered and Mao Tao refashioned itself—first caring for ailing and injured students, then soldiers and refugees caught up in ethnic conflicts, and now undocumented migrant workers.

Today, Mae Tao boasts 200 clinical staff plus 300 providing training, education and support. Half the patients are Burmese working in Thailand with the remainder crossing over the border specifically to seek treatment. There are departments for immunizations, HIV/AIDS, laboratory tests, eye surgery, dentistry, respiratory disease as well as distinct local needs—such as a dedicated malaria ward and a vital prosthetics department.

Khin Maung Than’s left leg was crushed in a traffic accident six months ago. Without his cherished prosthetic, handcrafted to precisely match his stump, the 56-year-old Mandalay native would be unable to keep working as a motor-rickshaw driver. “Because of this prosthetic leg, I can still support my two children,” he says. “I couldn’t earn a living otherwise.”

But Khin Maung Than is far from typical. A glance through the department’s register reveals most patients were maimed by land mines. Mae Tao mops up after ongoing clashes between the Burmese government and myriad ethnic armed groups—wounded rebels sometimes share wards with enemy soldiers. “When they are not in the front line, they will not fight,” says Dr. Cynthia.

Since 2011 the long-closed Burma has been pried open. Media censorship has eased, political prisoners have been released and unfettered by-elections saw Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi elected to parliament. But precious little reform has trickled down to the border regions. Rape, forced labor and assaults are legion.

Reform brings other problems. Dr. Cynthia has been lionized with awards from all around the globe, but as key donors—including the U.S., Canada and Britain—become enchanted by Burma’s renaissance, crucial funds are siphoned from the impoverished frontier to projects inside the country. Clinical services at Mao Tao cost almost $2 million annually, but resources are only secure until mid-2015. “It’s very challenging if you don’t have funds,” says Dr. Cynthia. “People come here for medical care but have many needs. We have to look not at a disease but at an individual.” Individuals like Lay Lay’s son, who might not yet have a name but, thanks to Dr. Cynthia, now has a chance.

An American 
veteran returns to Vietnam to help make it safer for 
his former enemy

Nearly 40 years on, Chuck Searcy is still fighting the Vietnam War—but now for the other side. It’s a September morning and Searcy, a 69-year-old veteran, is overseeing a team of Vietnamese about to blow up a bomb discovered in a village in the central coastal province of Quang Tri. Because of its proximity to the old DMZ between what was once North and South Vietnam, Quang Tri was subject to relentless bombing by U.S. warships and planes. As a result, the area is infested with unexploded ordnance (UXOs).

Now, after a torrential downpour, a UXO—in this case a baseball-size cluster bomblet—has surfaced in a villager’s garden. Team members use sirens and megaphones to evacuate residents. Sandbags are placed around the explosive. Moments later a concussive detonation rumbles through the hamlet as the deadly weapon is destroyed. “It’s safe now,” Searcy, a co-founder of the ordnance-removal organization Project Renew, says in Vietnamese.

Long after the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Washington and Hanoi remained foes. Besides being ideological opponents, the U.S. imposed an embargo that hindered large investments in Vietnam. But their relationship improved rapidly after they normalized diplomatic ties in 1995. Today the U.S. is Vietnam’s third biggest trading partner and its biggest export market. The two have also been brought closer by their mutual concern over China’s rise. Hanoi is now a frequent stop for top American officials visiting Southeast Asia, and Washington is even thinking of easing an arms embargo on Vietnam.

Searcy underwent a similar journey of alienation and re-engagement. He wasn’t in Vietnam long—just about a year in the late 1960s, working as an intelligence analyst in Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City). That’s all it took to disillusion him. The North Vietnamese engaged in propaganda, but so did the Americans. Searcy says he massaged information to fit U.S. policy: “We were lying.” After the war was over, Searcy felt a sense of relief—and release. “I sort of put Vietnam behind me,” he says in his Southern drawl.

In the next 25 years, Searcy had successful careers in media, politics and public service. He started a weekly paper in Athens, Georgia (his home state), and helped run political campaigns. He also served six years as director of the Georgia Trial Lawyers Association. Yet, try as he did, he could not forget Vietnam. “For me and most American veterans, [it] was the most profound experience of our lives.” Searcy went back for the first time in 1992 with an army buddy. Over a month, the two traveled the length of the now unified communist country. Searcy says the trip was life-changing: “I was astonished at the complete lack of anger or bitterness or hostility from the Vietnamese toward us returning GIs. It was amazing.”

Searcy was struck, too, by the determination of the Vietnamese to rebuild their battle-scarred nation. “I began to think that I’d like to contribute because I felt some responsibility as an American for what happened there.” A few years after his visit to Vietnam, Searcy turned down a good job with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington. His new mission: help make Vietnam a safer place for its people.

During the Vietnam War, U.S. forces dropped anywhere between 8 million and 15 million tons of ordnance across Indochina—several times that used by Allied forces on the Axis powers in World War II. The U.S. Department of Defense estimates that at least 10% of the munitions failed to detonate on impact. Since the war’s end, some 100,000 people have been killed or maimed by the residual explosives. Vietnamese officials say 83% of Quang Tri province is contaminated by UXOs.

Searcy decided that they needed to be tackled in a systematic way. In 2001 he founded Project Renew with support from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and the Quang Tri People’s Committee. Key to the operations has been the use of Vietnamese teams and resources. The 100-strong outfit is staffed primarily by locals. The province’s Youth Union teaches adults and children to identify ordnance and then call a hotline run by Project Renew when bombs are discovered. Through Vietnam’s Department of Health and local hospitals, amputees are fitted with prosthetics, while the Women’s Union helps manage microcredit loans for victims. “I’m very grateful to international organizations and friends who come back and help clean up the deadly remnants of war,” says retired Vietnamese colonel Bui Trong Hong, Project Renew’s national technical officer. “People like them understand how badly our country was devastated.”

Just in the past 24 months, Project Renew has eliminated about 27,000 pieces of ordnance, with only one accident reported in the past year in the districts where the teams operate. “[The system] results in a lot more ordnance destroyed on a daily basis,” says Searcy. Project Renew wants to scale up the Quang Tri model nationwide with the help of additional funding from the U.S. government. “It could happen in the next five to 10 years, at which point we Americans step back and can say we finally did what we should have done 40 years ago,” says Searcy. Perhaps then, for him, the war will be truly over.

Anish was just 5 years old when he went to prison in Nepal. The boy is no criminal—his only transgression was having a mother with a drug addiction. When she was arrested for trafficking, Anish had no choice but to go along with her. “I didn’t like it in there at all,” Anish, now 12, says.

Thankfully, Anish’s ordeal lasted just two months. Today he is thriving at a sanctuary for children with incarcerated mothers and no other family to care for them. “What I like most here is playing with my friends,” he says with a grin. Since 2005, around 160 youngsters like Anish have been spared the horrors of growing up inside the landlocked Himalayan nation’s unforgiving penal system, largely because of the efforts of Pushpa Basnet and her Early Childhood Development Center.

When she was 21 years old, Basnet visited Kathmandu’s main Janana Women’s Prison as part of her studies to be a social worker. What she witnessed shocked her: children being forced to grow up in a central, high-walled courtyard—no cells, just open plan—without proper toilets, bedding or any schooling—all the time mingling with hardened criminals. “I knew I needed to do something,” recalls Basnet.

Nine years have passed since that initial ghastly impression, during which time Basnet has turned a day-care center for four children—three of whom were born behind bars and had never breathed free air—into a three-story residential hostel that currently houses 44 children aged from 13 months to 18 years old. “When I was growing up, I didn’t want for anything,” she says. “I was lucky enough to have these opportunities, and so I want to give the same to them.”

Basnet’s quest began with a cobbled-together $1,000—along with toys, furniture and art supplies scavenged from friends and family—which she used to set up day-care services in a cramped $100-a-week apartment in Kathmandu, Nepal’s sprawling dustbowl capital. “Every day was a struggle to know if we had the money to continue,” she says. Two years later some of the older children had to leave prison and move to an orphanage. (Generally this happens around age 8 or 9, but largely at the discretion of each prison authority.) “But when I saw the orphanage, I was not happy,” says Basnet, who then extended her services to residential care.

Today the younger children get nursery lessons in the spotless hostel—boasting natural craft supplies, a library, comfy bunk beds and mountains of learning toys—while the older kids attend a regular school nearby. All are taught English, math and computer skills, and a range of extra­curricular activities including painting, trekking, camping and taekwondo. “A lot of them have so much anger inside that I think the fighting helps them release it,” says Basnet. (Anish has already gained his yellow belt.)

Yet Basnet’s journey has been far from smooth. “At first the mothers didn’t trust me, as I was so young,” she says. “Jailers would accuse me of trying to sell the children.” At the outset, she harbored misgivings about taking young children away from their mothers. On her first excursion with kids outside the fetid jail, their inquisitive glee at being in new surroundings swiftly transformed into screaming terror as they feared they had been abandoned by their mothers. “At that point I thought that I’d made a big mistake,” says Basnet. Nevertheless, she persevered with short sojourns, and “after two weeks they were so happy to come out from the prison.”

Despite initial reservations, incarcerated mothers became persuaded by Basnet’s ceaseless devotion. Sancha Maya Tamang, 40, gave her 5-month-old daughter to Basnet when she was sent to prison for murdering her abusive husband. “I wasn’t happy, as there were some problems inside the jail and she couldn’t get an education,” she says. “My child was better off outside.”

Devotion does not translate to indulgence, however. Basnet is firm with her charges, convinced that structure and discipline are imperative for troubled children. “If you are a little strict, then they learn to respect you,” she says. “That’s very important in our culture.” Yet she also appreciates that the children under her care need greater understanding than average kids. “I’ve never had to experience what they have had to experience,” she says. “I’ve had a girl who was raped by her father at the age of 5. When I compare my life with theirs, it is something totally different.”

This past Christmas, the children enjoyed a special dinner of roast chicken and sweet treats, along with games, dancing and a bonfire. Humble gifts such as toothbrushes, hairbands and plastic toys were handed out. “We are not a religious organization and have Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu children from villages from all over the country,” says Basnet. “So we used the occasion to learn about each other’s religions.”

Basnet’s work culminated with her being named CNN’s 2012 Hero of the Year, a prize accompanied by $300,000 of vital funding. While she is grateful for the honor, she says that “to get the children out of the prison was the most important thing for me.” The prize money has just been used to purchase land where she intends to build bigger and better facilities to house up to 80 children—space where more young innocents can be liberated from the sins they never committed.

Brother Efren is easy to find. Trace the curve of Manila Bay south, past the skyscrapers, through the urban sprawl. Inch across a jammed highway flanked by fishing huts on flamingo stilts. From there, the locals will be happy to guide you. “You must be here to see Efren,” ventures a man at a stop sign. “Take a left.” Offers another, moments later: “Looking for Ef? You’re going the right way.”

The pride of Cavite City, the man its residents call Brother Ef, is Efren Peñaflorida. Now 32, Peñaflorida survived a childhood marked by poverty, bullying and beatings to become CNN’s 2009 Hero of the Year and one of the Philippines’ most admired activists. As a teenager, he saw a simple solution to an enduring problem: the country’s most vulnerable children—street kids, scavengers—lack the time and money to go to school. So he took school to them. He packed pushcarts, or kariton, with books, toothbrushes and Band-Aids and wheeled them into the slums. Kids came running.

Some 15 years later, he’s still at it. The organization he co-founded, Dynamic Teen Co., uses kariton classrooms to connect with street kids and help get them back to formal schooling. The model has been so successful that it has been adopted across the Philippines, as well as in Indonesia and Kenya. “The idea is very simple,” says Peñaflorida. “Take kids what they need.”

In the Philippines, that need runs deep. The recent economic boom has bolstered the country’s bottom line, but, as Supertyphoon Haiyan made brutally clear, vast swaths of the population remain poor and marginalized. In 2011 the National Statistics Office estimated that 3 million Filipinos ages 5 to 17 worked mostly in “hazardous” conditions. A U.S. Department of Labor report suggests that the number dropped in 2012, thanks in part to a government program that pays parents to keep kids in school. Still, in Manila and its overburdened suburbs, it is common to see stick-legged children picking through piles of garbage, their backs bent double like old men.

It’s a scene Peñaflorida knows well. Born and raised on the edge of Cavite’s city dump, he spent his childhood hauling ingredients for his mother’s fried-noodle stand while dodging neighborhood thugs. He remembers patching his shoes with plastic scraps and being bullied, violently, because of his threadbare clothes. By age 13, he says, he felt “alone, angry, completely hardened.”

Peñaflorida might have stayed that way if he hadn’t met the man who would become his mentor, Harnin Manalaysay, then a professor who spent his weekends doing community outreach. Manalaysay saw Peñaflorida lingering hesitantly at the side of a basketball match and took him under his wing. The young man was soon spending his weekends taking books and basic foodstuffs to the places where he knew lost kids clustered: the cemetery, the market and the dump. Peñaflorida finished high school and, with help from Manalaysay, went to college. As his confidence grew, his boyhood anger gave way to quiet resolve. After graduating, he was tempted to join classmates seeking well-paying overseas jobs. He would have left if it weren’t for Manalaysay and the young people he had encountered. “I couldn’t bear to disappoint them,” he says.

The kariton concept grew out of these weekend missions. After a couple of years hauling supplies in backpacks, Peñaflorida’s team got hold of an old pushcart and transformed it into a makeshift, mobile classroom. These simple carts, often used by scavengers to move waste, were perfect for the task: small enough for narrow alleys, sturdy enough to withstand the slum. Plus, kids loved them: they rolled.

Today, classes are taught by a team of volunteers, some of whom, like 14-year-old Kesz Valdez, are former street kids themselves. All but abandoned by his family as a toddler, Kesz was sleeping on the street, begging and picking garbage by age 4. At 5, he was badly burned in a trash fire. Manalaysay and Peñaflorida took him in. He started tagging along with the cart, teaching other kids proper hand washing, toothbrushing and basic first aid. They listened, he says, “because I was like them also.”

Since being honored by CNN, Peñaflorida has been able to quit his full-time job as a high school math teacher to devote himself to community work and public speaking. His team now collaborates with a local school to enrollkariton “grads” and helps them with food, money and tutoring. If they are at risk of dropping out, they have the option of smaller classes and flexible hours. Peñaflorida encourages all his pupils to volunteer. Most do. In 2012, Kesz won the International Children’s Peace Prize. “Like Ef told me,” he says, “You’re never too ordinary to be a hero.”

In Cavite City, there is no bigger hero than Brother Ef. Teenagers stop him for pictures. Neighbors come by with food. People are proud of him. He is not a foreign aid worker, a well-meaning socialite or a missionary. He is from here, they say, he stayed here, and just look what he’s done. It’s easy, after all, to tell a kid to be hopeful. It’s entirely more powerful to give them a reason to hope.

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.

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 for the soldiers, but was soon handed a gun. “We believed what they told us, as we didn’t have any choice,” he says. “I didn’t know anything of the outside world.” It was during this fraught time that Aki Ra first became familiar with land mines. “Sometimes I would carry around 100 with me in a sack,” he says. “Every week I would see someone hurt by them.”

When the Khmer Rouge attempted to reclaim long-disputed territory by the Vietnamese border, they found their battle-hardened neighbors — fresh from besting first the Chinese and then American militaries — unwilling to acquiesce. The Vietnamese invaded and took control of Phnom Penh in 1979. Aki Ra was captured six years later. Facing execution, he started fighting for his captors against his former Khmer Rouge allies. “Once I saw my uncle in the enemy line opposite me, so I shot over his head to avoid killing him,” he says with a grin.

The Vietnamese withdrew in 1989, and Aki Ra faced his third conscription, this time into the Cambodian army, to battle the lingering fragments of the routed Khmer Rouge. Only then, aged around 20, did he finally receive any semblance of a school education — Aki Ra now speaks English, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, French and some Russian, along with his native Khmer.

U.N. peacekeepers rolled into Cambodia in 1992 to help facilitate a democratic transition, and Aki Ra was recruited to help clear land mines — work that came naturally to him. “When we were shooting during the war, we would always be feeling for mines with our feet,” he says, shuffling the dirt by way of demonstration. (Land mines generally take around 10 kg of force to detonate, so are unlikely to explode with gentle probing.)

By 1997, Aki Ra had collected so many bomb casings, weapons and unexploded ordnance that he opened the Cambodia Landmine Museum in Siem Reap. An adjacent school and relief center for orphans, young land-mine victims and rural destitute followed. More than 100 children have since passed through the organization — 27 are currently at school and nine are studying at university. Aki Ra also has three children of his own — one called, intriguingly, Mine. “As a baby he would sleep with a lot of land-mine casings around,” explains Aki Ra, “and whenever he woke up he would play with them. The name just stuck.”

Because of the vast collective effort of NGOs and government agencies, land-mine casualties in Cambodia have plummeted from about 4,300 in 1996 to 77 in the first half of this year. Since 2008, Aki Ra’s CSHD team has put some 100,000 people back on 180 cleared hectares of land. In a nation where an estimated quarter of the 14 million population subsists on less than $1 a day, that’s an enormous achievement.

Just an hour’s drive east of historic Angkor Wat, Van Pok, 33, farms bananas, potatoes, rice and coconuts next to Aki Ra’s latest clearance project. “I was very scared of the bombs because of my two young children,” she says. Soon the village will build a house and a vegetable garden on the onetime minefield — a dream now possible on a land that no longer kills.