SARAVAN, Laos — The 30 students in Ondomxai Dom’s Grade 1 class sit transfixed by the story she is reading of a boy and his father who happen upon a big piece of black iron while wading through a rice paddy.

The children — 16 boys and 14 girls in the concrete-walled, open-windowed elementary school — are transfixed as Dom continues.

Copper has been a valuable commodity in remote, very poor Laotian villages. So Dad tries to crack open the hunk of metal when suddenly — BOOM! — it explodes. Dom lowers the storybook and asks in a loud voice: If you see a bomb like that, will you touch it?

“No!” comes the resounding chorus from the students, aged six and seven.

Forty years after it ended, the Vietnam War is still killing and maiming people in Laos. The country is littered with cluster bombs, the lethal legacy of a covert carpet-bombing campaign by the United States during the Vietnam War.

The story book used in Dom’s class was supplied by World Education, a U.S.-based non-governmental agency that works with the Laos government to teach school children to avoid unexploded cluster bombs. Lessons like this are not mandatory until the equivalent of Grade 5, said Mark Gorman, the organization’s country director in Laos.

From 1964 to 1973, American warplanes dropped two million tonnes of bombs on this tiny country in an attempt to close the stretch of the Ho Chi Minh trail — the communist North Vietnamese supply route — that snaked through Laos.

The weapons the Americans dropped on Laos during the Vietnam War included bombs holding 270 million cluster bomblets, 80 million of which failed to explode. These tiny submunitions — locals call them “bombies” — resemble baseballs or tennis balls.

Decades after they fell, they remain dangerous and have wounded or killed 20,000 civilians here since the end of the war. An estimated 12,000 Laotians are still living with their injuries. Almost half are children.

The United States is leading the international effort to help Laos clear the cluster bombs by contributing $9 million of the $30 million Laos receives in annual international funding. Most goes towards clearance operations — leaving only 10 cents on the dollar for preventative education for young people.

Canada ceased to be a contributor to the Laos unexploded ordnance (UXO) sector in 2012 after contributing more than $2 million between 1996 and 2011. Laos has asked Canada to resume funding, but has received no reply.

“Half the accidents involve kids. And half of those could have been prevented,” said Gorman.

Back in Dom’s classroom, the lesson continues for her young charges, who listen attentively behind simple wooden desks in their ill-fitting white and blue uniforms. She teaches this class twice a week for 30 minutes.

Clad in a traditional ankle-length Laotian skirt and a white blouse, her hair pulled back in a bun, Dom gently motions a boy up to the chalkboard.

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He intently draws a cluster bomblet and then a cylinder like the one that would have held it and hundreds more. A girl follows with her own careful rendering.

In her 27 years teaching, Dom says she has seen much progress in educating students in her region about the dangers of cluster bombs.

Yet accidents continue to kill or maim children. Just a week earlier, the director of the Laos government’s National Regulatory Authority (NRA), which oversees the country’s cluster munitions strategy, visited the bedside of a badly injured family in a northern province.

“It’s sad to me,” said Phoukhieo Chanthasombone as he described what happened to a mother, father and six children who clearly had no inkling of the danger of cluster bombs.

They were awaiting the evening meal the mother was preparing in a pot over a fire.

“One of the kids found a cluster bomb,” Phoukhieo recalled. “He didn’t know that was a cluster, a bomb. He gave it to the mother. And the mother also doesn’t know this is the cluster bomb. The mother put it on the fire.

“And 20 minutes later, she took out the bomb and put it just beside the fire. Thirty minutes after that, the bomb explodes. Three kids were injured, one kid died. The mother broke her leg. Now they are hospitalized.”

Dom delivers one final warning: “If you don’t have legs and hands, how can you live?”