Heather went to Vietnam to meet the people and help raise funds through No More Landmines. These same people are the people who were waiting to move back to their land and were injured by landmines and required treatment.

She visited Quang Tri Province, near the former Demilitarised Zone that separated North from South Vietnam during the Vietnam war. This area is now one of the most mined areas in the world. Landmines and unexploded ordnance continue to litter the land. But people need to grow rice in the fields and vegetables in the gardens, so they work the land despite the well-known risk to life and limb. Accidents are frequent, some 2,000 women, men and children are injured or killed every year.

Lai Ly does not sit around and complain. She hopes that luck will be on her side, which is why she named her 6-year-old daughter Dueng (which means fate) and her 3-year-old son Tinh (which means love). In 1972 her family had to leave Quang Tri Province when the fighting around here turned particularly ugly. They finally returned in 1997, but found that the only piece of land they could afford was in the middle of a minefield, right where the US firebase Charlie One was located during the war.

Everybody thought she was crazy. She surely was very lucky. For four years, Lai Ly lived with her husband, father and two children amongst mines waiting to go off, and nothing ever happened. Of course they were worried, and Lai Ly's father moved countless mines and pieces of unexploded ordnance away as he prepared the area for the house and the fields. When the British mine clearance organisation MAG finished clearing the area around her house in 2001, they had found more than a thousand mines and 7,000 pieces of unexploded ordnance. Two of these mines had been sitting right next to Lai Ly's kitchen, waiting to explode.

When Lai Ly saw the MAG team working around her house, she decided that she wanted to be part of this important work and help to make life safe again for the people of Vietnam. So she joined the MAG team as one of several female deminers in 2001. Since then she wakes up every morning to go and clear more mines.

Lai Ly does not consider herself brave. On the contrary, she says now that she is trained as a deminer, she does not have to be afraid of landmines anymore, because she knows exactly how to deal with them.

Heather also met Suong, an 8-year-old girl who was playing with her friends one day when they found a piece of unexploded ordnance. There was a big bang, and Suong doesn't know what happened next. She just knows that ever since then she has not gone to school, and the splitting headache from the piece of shrapnel still lodged in her head has become a part of her. It costs just $1,000 to remove it, but that is far beyond what her family can afford.

Heather's trip has been shown on UK national television, on the Tonight with Trevor McDonald show, to raise awareness and funds for the people of Vietnam through No More Landmines.

Heather now focuses her amputee and landmines related charity work on No More Landmines, a campaign that raises awareness and funds to clear landmines and help landmine survivors. To learn more about No More Landmines work in Vietnam please visit www.landmines.org.uk for more information.