I recently found myself in Kosovo with one of our humanitarian aid teams to visit a school for learning how to defuse explosives. Here’s why I went.

After some travel complications and working in a coffee shop in Germany while I waited for a flight, I met up with the team in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, to help them get ready for their time in country. This was my first time in the Balkans, and I thoroughly enjoyed spending a day with the team getting settled in and exploring the city.

Kosovo is a complicated country (and calling it a country is very controversial depending on where you go). After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 there was a number of conflicts in this region and the people of Kosovo claimed independence. This area was once Yugoslavia which, after the fall of the USSR, devolved into various civil wars and ethnic cleansings. A number of new nations formed out of the conflict, including Kosovo. However, around half the countries in the world don’t recognize Kosovo’s claim of nationhood. A brutal war was fought in the remains of Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s, until NATO and America helped negotiate a peace deal for Kosovo in 1999.

After our time in the capital we headed to Peja, the city where the team will be living for a number of weeks and training in the intricacies of defusing explosive remnants of war. Because of the long conflict in Kosovo and surrounding areas, there were a lot of unexploded remnants of war that needed to be cleared. The training school started as a result of teams clearing areas after the war ended. One of the instructors told me there’s roughly 50 sites in Kosovo that remain to be cleared.

At this point you’re probably wondering why we’re doing this and what I’m doing in this place to begin with. If you’ve watched my earlier videos from Iraq (such as this one and this one), you’ll remember I spent some time in areas where ISIS had been in control. That experience fundamentally changed me, and I’ll never forget the massive destruction I witnessed there. Not only were people’s homes damaged, there are also countless explosives throughout the region that make it dangerous for refugees to return to their homes. Groups like ISIS and other militias often leave explosives behind, as they are forced out of an area. Weapons left like this leave a region uninhabitable (sometimes for many years), until someone comes and deals with the danger.

I went to the Sinjar region twice after it had been liberated. The first time (in August 2016), ISIS was only a mile away, still stubbornly holding on to land in northwestern Iraq. When I returned to the area in 2017, we went to the top of Mount Sinjar. Even though we were on the main road into the city, and though it was over a year since ISIS was there, I noticed what looked like an IED (improvised explosive device) in the rocks a few feet off the road. Just as I was saying to one of the local children to stay away from it, he picked it up. It was a device about 6 inches square, connected to two wires that ran down and disappeared among the stones. Honestly, when that boy picked up the device, I thought we had a good chance of getting blown up. As it turned out, as the boy laughed at the panicked look on my face, he held it up to reveal it was empty. We got lucky that day. Apparently ISIS, as they were retreating, didn’t have time to load it with explosives.

Ever since then, I wondered why there isn’t a greater effort being made to remove these instruments of war and destruction, so that normal civilians can return and rebuild their lives. A tragic fact of explosives used in war is that civilians (and often children) are frequently the victims. As I looked into it more, I found that unexploded weapons are a huge problem in many areas that were once war zones. These explosives pose a risk to civilians and often cause large areas to be rendered useless. After all, you can’t live on a minefield. Many, many places around the world suffer from the dangers of remnants of war, left over from conflicts as diverse as World War II, civil wars, terrorism, and other conflicts. In 2018 alone, 6,897 civilians were injured or killed by explosives left over from warring groups. That comes to nearly 19 casualties per day. And that number is not an anomaly; here’s a chart showing some years have been even worse. Here’s a video of just how bad things are in places like Yemen. The instructors told our team that at the current rate explosives are being removed, it will take 1,000 years to clear all of them from around the world.

For several years the organization I’m a part of has been looking into helping remove those weapons of destruction, chaos, and death. I believe war is not the answer to the world’s problems, and what better way to live out that belief than by removing the very things that cause so much damage to families who are simply trying to live normal lives?

And now, our first team is training to do just that. We don’t yet know where they will go with the skills they are learning; the project is too new at this point, but I’m so excited to see it move forward. This world has put a lot of effort into killing each other; we can help reverse that. Through this work, we can remove a little more chaos from the world, and bring a little more peace.

If you would like to learn more about the project, check out this page on our organization’s website.

Here’s a video I made when we visited the training school in Kosovo.