Landmines continue to cause irreparable damage in the lives of innocent victims long after wars have ended. In a June 1997 newsletter, United Methodist missionaries Bryan Stone, M.D., and Ann Stone, R.N., of Chicuque Rural Hospital in Mozambique, shared the tragedy of a 30-year-old farmer maimed twice by landmines. A landmine struck Jose for the second time while he was kneeling to plant crops. The explosion damaged both eyes and split his lower lids. The Stones describe the farmer’s ordeal in their June 1997 newsletter: In the operating room, we removed one globe but there was enough left of the other to leave it as a filler. His eye sockets and the blast burns on his hand and forehead healed quickly, but he was totally blind. He always smiled when he heard our voices and was eager to get on with his life. At discharge, we sent him to get two prostheses – one for his eye and another for the leg he lost when he stepped on his first land mine in 1990. Although blinded by the accident, Jose considered himself fortunate to be alive. Had the mine been planted at a different angle, he would have been killed. And the Floodwaters Came We sat in the small room at Pastor Michaels’ home in Xai Xai, Mozambique. The telltale signs of the flood this spring showed on the wall six inches above the doors. Pastor Michaels, his wife, and three small children has spent four days in a tree waiting for the flood water to go down. They had lost everything. Their concern was for the villages in the valley that had lost all their food reserves, washed away by the floods.
