BackSometimes, life delivers a humbling reset.
Last week, I travelled eight hours north from Colombo to Jaffna, Sri Lanka, with The HALO Trust, the world’s largest humanitarian demining organisation. What I encountered there was a stark reminder of how much of what we call success is shaped by the lottery of birth: where we’re born, which families raise us, which countries we call home.
I joined HALO’s board of trustees earlier this year. Like many, I had known the organisation primarily through that iconic 1997 image of Princess Diana walking through a minefield in Angola. I knew the photograph. I did not truly know the work.
Now I do.
Since its founding in 1988, when Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan leaving behind a devastating landmine crisis, HALO has operated across more than 32 countries and territories. In Sri Lanka alone, where HALO has worked since 2002, the organisation has cleared over 300,000 landmines, and in total over a million explosive items.
The Northern Province, where I spent a few days with HALO’s teams, bears the deep scars of Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil conflict. HALO Sri Lanka has a staff that has ranged from roughly 850 staff to more than 1,200, making it one of the region’s largest employers. Over 99 percent of positions are filled by local recruits. Many of these deminers are clearing the very land from which they were once displaced.
What I witnessed challenged every assumption I held about post conflict reconstruction.
Decades of disrupted education mean hiring locally requires a fundamentally different approach. Training is not a single induction but continuous, rigorous preparation and development. New de-miners must learn to identify seventeen different types of landmines as well as other explosive hazards: anti personnel mines, anti vehicle mines, unexploded ordnance, improvised explosive devices. They must learn how to locate and excavate them precisely and safely, being tested against rigorous standards before they are allowed to join an experienced team operating in the minefields. However, even for the most experienced de-miner, training does not stop there. There is daily refresher training on particular drills before teams move into their clearance lanes, while more extended refresher training takes place at frequent intervals throughout the year. Those operating more specialist equipment conduct refresher training every three months. It’s a continuous process.
42% percent of HALO Sri Lanka’s de-miners are women, including at every level of leadership in the field. A manual demining team commander will lead a team of eight. One of those will be a highly-trained team medic, supported by a minimum of two other medically-trained personnel, including the commander and 2IC. Safety is never assumed; it is engineered into every operation.
The terrain itself demands innovation. Minefields hidden in dense jungle, along coastlines, on islands, buried amongst field fortifications and earthworks, and submerged in lagoons require novel solutions and sometimes specialist equipment, including a bespoke, first-of-type amphibious excavator provided by the United States Government at the end of last year. The Sri Lankan teams have developed new standard operating procedures for using it to clear mines from waterlogged environments that will now be shared across HALO’s global operations, including for Ukraine, which faces similar problems with the flooding of minefields from ruptured and damaged dams.
This is what locally-led development looks like in practice. This is impact beyond headlines.
I met families finally able to return home after decades of displacement. I saw the quiet pride of people reclaiming land that once threatened their lives. And I learned that HALO is even now constantly developing its staff’s skills and preparing them for a life beyond demining, when they have completed their demanding and dedicated work to remove the very last explosive hazard from the earth of Sri Lanka.
HALO is often remembered for one photograph from the 1990s. It deserves to be known for the thousands of lives it protects every day since.
If you care about stability, about rebuilding after conflict, about dignity and safety as foundations for everything else, I urge you to learn more about The HALO Trust. Support takes many forms: funding, partnerships, advocacy, conversation.
Some organisations change landscapes. Some organisations change lives.
HALO does both.
Originally featured in Substack
