Somewhere in the vast sea of elephant grass that makes up Katanga province, in Democratic Republic of Congo, lies the village of Cantonnier. Like all of the other villages in the region, it's nothing more than a long string of mud huts straddling one of the very few roads. "Roads" being a rather euphemistic term for the spine-shattering stretches of mud - in the rainy season - or dust - in the dry season - that connect these remote villages.

The local chief of Cantonnier had passed a message down the "road" to say that his son had found some kind of explosive device in the village. The chief was afraid that other children wouldn't be able to resist playing with it. Could I come urgently?

The last fighting in this area took place in 2002 when the Rwandan and Burundian armies swept aside the forces of the Congolese government and their Zimbabwean allies.

The battles were generally short and sharp. What they lacked in duration, they made up for in distance. Almost every village on the 270km (175-mile) "road" between Lake Tanganika and Lake Mwero is contaminated with unexploded ordnance.

Three days after the chief's son's find - a fast turnaround in a country of poor communications and worse transportation - I arrived in the village with a mine clearance team from the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) in tow. The chief was away tending his fields but his son was around.

Kitapa Mukali was wearing a dirty brown sweater and ragged green shorts. He had a ready smile and intelligent eyes, although he was a little intimidated about speaking to his first white man. I asked him how old he was and he looked bemused. Not only did he not know, but no one had ever asked him before. My Congolese colleagues estimated Kitapa to be about 8 years old.

When he grows up, Kitapa wants to be a footballer. He shyly showed me his football, a ball of tightly-wrapped straw encased in old, plastic, carrier bags. It was surprisingly bouncy and durable but I was afraid that my hiking boots would destroy it a lot faster than Kitapa's bare feet.

Kitapa wants to be a footballer so much that a little thing like a lack of a pitch wasn't going to stop him. As the rainy season has just ended, he organised some friends to cut back the vegetation and make their own pitch. Kitapa's dad said that if they did a good job, he would make them some goalposts.

Borrowing machetes from their fathers, the group of friends went to work. Almost immediately, Kitapa saw something suspicious under a small bush. He peered closely at the object and then recoiled with fear.

He didn't exactly know what it was but he did know that it was something he shouldn't touch. Only last month, a team from MAG had visited his school and told everyone about the dangerous things left behind from the war.

The unexploded ordnance around here takes many forms: rockets, artillery shells, hand grenades, mortar bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and cluster bombs were all used with abandon. Those that failed to detonate remain embedded in the ground or hidden in the dense elephant grass.

I asked Kitapa to take me to where he could see the bush and point it out to me. He brought two friends along for moral support. The bush was about 10 metres away when Kitapa stopped and pointed. I could see nothing from this distance, so I sent the boys back and went to have a closer look.

Lying right at the base of the bush, half-hidden in the shadows was a black, egg-like object. It was a hand grenade, seemingly dropped by a passing soldier. It had never been thrown.

I carefully examined it, without touching, to make sure that no rusty safety pin would snap if I picked it up. It looked fine, so I tightly taped the safety pin and fly-off lever in place and carried the grenade to the car.

It was destroyed later with a pile of other unexploded ordnance from other villages down the "road".

In a country the size of Western Europe but with a fraction of the infrastructure, the impact of the explosive remnants of war is difficult to estimate. Reliable casualty data are hard to come by and fatalities are frequently buried without recourse to official records.

However, as former refugees return to their villages and start to clear land to rebuild their house and to plant crops, they discover more and more of these deadly devices.

As Kitapa and his friends ran off to collect their machetes and finish their football pitch, I couldn't help but hope that I might have played some small part in creating the world's next footballing sensation.

Reuters AlertNet is not responsible for the content of external websites.