If a colleague were injured or killed on the job, that would be devastating in itself. But soon you would have to return to work, facing the same risks, perhaps in the lane where your colleague triggered the mine. Death by land-mine blast is not pretty, and the image lingers. After one accident, bits of clothing were found in the branches of a nearby tree. In another, a finger was found much later in a distant field.
Frequent finds provide the best training for future encounters.
If no mines are located for days or months, skills and awareness invariably begin to slip from sheer lack of practice. The U.N. program has retained a small area, still densely populated with mines, for training purposes. Exposure to this high-density minefield is an invaluable experience, because the reality of so much demining is very different. This is true in other mined countries as well. Deminers are finding far fewer mines than initially believed.