"Red is dead. Follow the white stones"

Somalia. The word arrives carrying thirty years of other people's footage, so you get pirates and warlords and a film about a helicopter. Nobody I spoke to before this trip could picture the place, and everybody was certain about it.

In 1988, something like nine-tenths of Hargeisa was rubble. When Somaliland declared itself done with the union in 1991, it began rebuilding with no recognition, no seat at any table and no cavalry coming. The city you land in today was put back together brick by brick, much of it with money wired home by Somalis abroad.

The gap between the headline and the ground is one of the widest I've ever measured. I arrived carrying other people's pictures of this place, and left carrying my own.

A $300 drone and a $50,000 habit

I'm a technologist, and HALO works in austere places on money that has to stretch, so my task on a trip like this is to watch how the teams operate and then work out what technology would make them faster, safer or cheaper.

At Dabagoryaale, near the Ethiopian border, a heavy excavator worked inside the minefield with a specialist attachment that chewed through the soil, the operator sitting in a protected cab behind heavy glass and the machine processing ground far faster than any person with a detector.

I put a small drone up so we could watch the machine from above in real time, and the calculation was simple, because mine is a $300 machine and if something went wrong it was expendable. A few hundred dollars of commercial hardware gave the clearance team a view of their own ground that nobody had to walk to get, and that's the point of the price.

At $300 nobody hesitates to send it where they wouldn't send a person, and a donation at that price doesn't buy one clever machine, it puts another pair of eyes over every team that wants one. That was one of about fifteen ideas I came home with.

Drones flying set patterns to spot surface ordnance before anybody walks the ground.

High-definition mapping built from imagery rather than from memory, so that a cleared area becomes a record instead of a rumour.

Airborne laser scanning to read terrain a survey team would otherwise have to walk across.

Satellite tasking over contamination nobody can safely go and look at.

The arithmetic of clearance

The reason I came was mines, and that sentence needs correcting straight away. There are anti-personnel mines and anti-tank mines, and minimum-metal mines built to leave a detector almost nothing to find, and then there's everything that was fired and failed, or abandoned, or left where the fighting stopped.

A HALO supervisor stood me in front of a large field map, and it looked at first like something from a surveyor's office, until you understood what the symbols meant. Mines already found. Accident sites. Cleared areas, suspected areas, lanes, tracks, craters, water, trees. On the ground the system gets simpler, because painted stones tell you where you stand. White marks the safe passage, and the red-painted face points towards danger.

Red is dead. Follow the white stones.

The more interesting question is what happens once the explosives are gone.

HALO counts its work in square metres and mines found and lanes completed, because that's what a donor can audit. Communities count it as a water tank that works again, or a crop in the ground, or a child who can walk the short way home.

In Las Anod, the story gets harder. In the west most of what's out there is forty years old and under the ground.

In Las Anod it's three years old and still lying where it fell, tanks and artillery, mortars and rockets, and in parts of the town you can walk fifty metres and encounter dozens of hazardous items.

Sometimes the danger is just the interesting-looking object lying in the dirt.

HALO counts its work in square metres and mines found and lanes completed, because that's what a donor can audit. Communities count it as a water tank that works again, or a crop in the ground, or a child who can walk the short way home.

In Las Anod, the story gets harder. In the west most of what's out there is forty years old and under the ground. In Las Anod it's three years old and still lying where it fell, tanks and artillery, mortars and rockets, and in parts of the town you can walk fifty metres and encounter dozens of hazardous items. Sometimes the danger is just the interesting-looking object lying in the dirt.

The mayor told me about the first months after the fighting, when people cooked their evening meals on fires propped up with pieces of ordnance, because the debris of the war was the material to hand. A town surrounded by explosives, and dinner still has to be cooked.

A child in Las Anod found an unexploded anti-armour tank round, carried it home and started fiddling with it, and it detonated. He and his mother were killed, and four other family members were injured, including a three-month-old baby.

The mayor's request to me was one sentence: help us clear these items before the children find them.

Later the same day we visited a school, and hours earlier I'd been standing beside piles of ordnance recovered from the places children like these walk through to get there. That is the arithmetic of clearance. A tank round found before a child finds it. A route swept in the hour before school lets out. The politicians have finished their war, and the child walking to school is still in it until somebody clears the ground he walks on.

Mine clearance is the first act, and the outcome is access. Access to water and grazing, to roads and schools and fields, and to ordinary life. Eventually livestock can return, land that had stopped being useful is useful again, and a family that had been looking at it through a fence can walk out onto it. Even the trees are handled with care, because some inside the contaminated area are marked as uncleared rather than pulled out, and the land has to work afterwards.

Where I'd put money

New technology will shape the next decade of mine clearance, and none of it is theoretical. The kit I've described is being flown, driven and tested by HALO in Ukraine, Syria and Zimbabwe as well as the Horn of Africa. HALO's Technology Accelerator Fund exists to get exactly this kind of equipment, cheap, simple and expendable, into the hands of the teams who need it. That's where I'd put money.

War turns ordinary ground into uncertainty, and HALO's work is to turn it back, a map and a cleared lane and a water point and a field, metre by metre, and the mines are patient but the people clearing them are more patient than that.

White marks the safe passage. The red-painted face points towards danger.

Follow the white stones.