CUITO CUANAVALE, Angola — Domingos Luis, a 20-year-old farmer, has lived his entire life in a hamlet surrounded by land mines, their lurking threat a constant presence. He remembers the old man who was killed after stepping on an explosive while tending his crops. Wild pigs and deer still set off mines in the nearby bush.
“I grew up with the fear that behind every bush there might be a mine,” he said.
When he was a boy, the village elders told him “where to go, where to move, how to move.” But sticking to the strict confines went against a child’s irrepressible desire to wander and explore.
