MORGANTOWN — Just now, it happened.
In the time it took you to read the above, someone, somewhere in the world, stepped on a landmine from a long-ago conflict.
He’ll likely face life as an amputee, maybe with a disfigured face and his eyesight robbed.
Or, he could die down the road from the trauma of internal injuries that will never heal.
Just now.
“This is why we do this,” Hector Guerra told a rapt audience of youngsters in an art classroom Tuesday afternoon at St. Francis Central Catholic School.
Guerra is the director of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, the Geneva watchdog group that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its efforts.
He was calling on the school and his friend, Nora Sheets, the St. Francis art teacher who is also known globally for that mission.
Twenty years ago, Sheets, with the help of three students, founded PSALM: Proud Students Against Landmines and Cluster Bombs.
Over those years, PSALM students have raised money to purchase artificial limbs for victims and other causes.
And their social-activist artwork has been displayed all over the world.
Before PSALM, Sheets had traveled to war-torn Bosnia in the 1990s to offer her art-teaching expertise as a way to help the maimed children to literally draw their way out of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The worst, she said, were the kids on crutches, with empty sleeves and pant legs where limbs were supposed to be.
In years since, she’s been to Vietnam, Afghanistan and other places where the explosive devices are still claiming civilians.
Three years ago, according to the most recent international compilation of numbers of victims, a total of 2,089 civilians were killed when they stepped on mines.
Another 6,516 were permanently injured. Forty-two percent of the dead or injured victims were children.
Today, Guerra will speak to medical professionals in Morgantown at 1 p.m. at the Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center.
His friend’s classroom came first, however.
There, Guerra met students such as Paige Hammack, an eighth-grader, who said she was at first surprised — then angry — when she learned people her age were dying from landmines.
“Maybe a kid was just going after a soccer ball,” she said.
Guerra said he was heartened by the empathy of the St. Francis students.
“You’re doing amazing work,” he said.
Twitter @DominionPostWV
JBissett@DominionPost.com
