(BBC) – Joao Madamol was just 11 years old when he witnessed the sheer terror and insanely random nature of anti-personnel mines.
“I saw a woman in a field being carried off on a stretcher with her leg blown off,” he says.
One of the men trailing behind was carrying a fragment of what he would learn later was an anti-personnel mine.
Trying to ensure others did not face the same pain and misery would become his life’s work.
As a young Mozambican growing up during the civil war in the late 70s and early 80s, Joao saw first hand how his country, like many others at the time, found itself embroiled in the enmities of the Cold War, fuelling its own internal conflicts.
