He served the Khmer Army for nearly ten years, working on this massive mine-laying project while dudes jammed AK-47s in his back and ordered him around.
The UN trained Aki in the proper application of protective bomb-proof armor, mine detector operation, and sweep-and-clear removal processes for dealing with dense fields of high explosives, but when those guys left town, Aki realized he didn't have very much in the way of money or equipment.
The head-smashing ridiculousness of what this guy is doing is only further demonstrated by the fact that this human bomb-clearing robot can dig out, clear, and defuse a standard land mine in about two minutes – a process that usually takes the United Nations bomb teams something more on the order of one to two hours.
From 1994 to 2007, Aki Ra grabbed a shovel, a stick, and a knife and personally went out into the jungles of the densely-populated Siam Reap region of Cambodia to remove Soviet, Chinese, and Vietnamese-constructed land mines.
Thanks in no small part to the work of this one man, the number of accidental landmine casualties in Cambodia dropped from 3,047 to 1,109 in the three-year span from 1996 to 1999.
He now has a team of over 1,000 people working in de-mining operations across the country, and claims that in the 16 years he has been on the job he's personally removed and cleared over 50,000 mines by himself.
Eventually Aki Ra had removed so many landmines that his house was overflowing with the $#@!, so in 1998 he opened the Cambodian Landmine Museum as a place to displace the unexploded ordinance and educate people on how much landmines seriously suck balls.
When he's not running a successful non-governmental organization, curating the museum, or flexing his pulsating iron ballsack, Aki Ra also takes in homeless, (often-times drug-addicted) local kids who have had appendages blown off by land mines and provides them with adequate food, shelter, and education. Aki provides for his twenty-plus "children" by going out into the jungles and hunting wild boars with a crossbow. I wish I was making this $#@! up.
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