Injury Date: June 2000

Injuries: Cluster bomb explosion. partial loss of left foot; loss of right leg; loss of right arm; loss of left thumb; loss of right eye; facial scarring

CPI Assistance: Revisive surgeries; prosthetics; physical rehabilitation. Ongoing treatment.

It was summer, 2000. Thirteen-year-old Ho Van Lai had been looking forward to the school year. He couldn't wait to see his friends again and return to the soccer field where he excelled in a sport every Vietnamese boy is crazy about. But an event more terrible than he or his family could have imagined suddenly changed his life.

Lai and his cousins were playing among the pines in the sandy soil of Gio Linh, just south of the former Demilitarized Zone in central Vietnam. The boys found what looked like a small metal ball. They began kicking it and only minutes later the cluster bomb, typical for the kind of explosives still everywhere in that part of Vietnam, detonated.

Two of the boys were killed. Lai's other cousin got off with minor injuries, but Lai himself lost an eye, an arm, a thumb, one leg and part of his other foot. His boyhood dreams appeared shattered. "I thought I would never play football (soccer) again," Lai said. But more than a year later, Lai's hopes are rising again.

He and more than 100 other landmine/bomb accident survivors were screened by a medical team co-sponsored by Clear Path International in June. After that, he was selected by Clear Path for surgery at the Da Nang Orthopedic & Rehabilitation Center, fitted for a prosthetic foot and provided with more than two months of physical therapy. He started with the parallel bars, then practiced walking behind a wheelchair and is soon expected to be fully mobile.

"I had given up hope," he said. "But now I know if I work really hard I can some day play soccer again."

What Lai still needs: Continued physical therapy, support to go to school, peer support and, eventually an opportunity to learn vocational skills.

See a video about Lai here.