Washington -- The tragedies continue, never-ending, indiscriminately, in scattered parts of the world, at the rate of hundreds a week.

A child at play in Africa, a farmer plowing a field in Southeast Asia, a woman carrying goods from a market in Eastern Europe -- all of them victims of the tens of millions of land mines still being deployed in more than 60 countries.

Anti-personnel land mines are the leading cause of war-related injury and disability on earth, claiming an estimated 26,000 victims each year. Those who are not killed by accidentally stepping on a land mine are seriously maimed and face the arduous challenge of learning to live with an artificial limb.

"It is not enough just to relieve the suffering; there is also a need for research and training to assist land mine victims," says Robert Jaeger, a U.S. government official actively involved in such a program.

Jaeger, a program officer with the Department of Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), oversees projects that provide federal grants to nongovernmental organizations.

NIDRR has awarded a five-year $4.25 million grant to the Illinois-based nonprofit Physicians Against Land Mines (PALM) to establish a Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on improved technology access for land mine survivors.

PALM provides an opportunity for physicians and health care workers to "make a difference." The project's objectives, Jaeger says, are to research and develop innovative prosthetic devices that can be affordably manufactured and serviced in countries that are plagued with land mines, and to develop educational materials to enhance training for local rehabilitation workers.

The center focuses on five main areas:

-- Research and technology: developing low-cost, direct-fitting socket techniques and designing internationally affordable prosthetic systems utilizing thermoformable plastics.

-- Education and training: modules in prosthetics and rehabilitation, for use in developing countries, to help disseminate practical medical and technological knowledge for providing such services to amputees as education, transportation and health care.

-- Employment initiatives: strategies to enhance opportunities for victims to engage in productive work.

-- Global partnerships: consensus conferences, workshops and an international rehabilitation network to assist service providers with new technology and program development.

-- Policy and prevention: solutions not only for the biological, psychological and medical aspects of disability, but for the social and environmental aspects as well.

Personnel from the center visit areas of strife around the world and cooperate with other relief agencies. The center estimates that 80 percent of the world's disabled population lives in the Third World and only 2 percent of that number ever receive rehabilitation.

PALM uses public service announcements, public testimony, and print and electronic advertising to increase awareness through international law of the land mine issue in an effort to end the global land mine epidemic. Additionally, its representatives participate in global conferences, such as the United Nations meeting on demining in Mozambique the first week of May 1999.

The organization also supports the creation of global trust funds for land mine survivors to ensure the delivery of long term assistance -- for example, the recently established Republic of Slovenia International Trust Fund for Demining and Mine Victims Assistance in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Jaeger points out that the United States has appropriated $28 million for this fund, and is urging international donors to join the effort because it will match those donations from its appropriation.

The monies are to be used for demining efforts that contribute to the revitalization of the economy; the return of refugees; medically oriented programs that deal with the treatment, psychological counseling and physical rehabilitation of mine victims; and the training of Bosnian doctors and health specialty technicians.

In its assessments of its land mine programs, Jaeger says, NIDRR constantly wants to know if there is something else that could be done to enhance them, something better. "We not only want to relieve the suffering, we also want to get a handle on the scope of the problem, and learn something about improving service," he adds.

Jaeger points out that artificial limbs are expensive and must be replaced every three to five years for adults and every six to twelve months for a growing child.

Stressing that land mines are more weapons of terror than they are weapons of war, affecting four times as many civilians as soldiers, Jaeger says the mines continue to adversely affect people long after actual hostilities have ceased.