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UNICEF Ambassador Lucy Liu shows residents of a camp for internally displaced people in the DR Congo that a UNICEF-supplied water source is safe for drinking.
For more information visit: unicefusa.org/drc
Donate now to support UNICEF's work in the DRC: unicefusa.org/donate/drc
UNICEF Ambassador Lucy Liu witnesses the internal refugee crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo, specifically its effects on children.
For more information visit: unicefusa.org/drc
Donate now to support UNICEF's work in the DRC: unicefusa.org/donate/drc
UNICEF Ambassador Lucy Liu visits a UNICEF-supported hospital for women and children in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
For more information visit: unicefusa.org/drc
Donate now to support UNICEF's work in the DRC: unicefusa.org/donate/drc
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| © U.S. Fund for UNICEF/2007/McKenzie | |
| Lucy Liu shows photos to young girls outside a UNICEF-supported education center for street youth in Goma, Eastern DRC. |
I met with a series of young boys who had escaped from armed militia, where they had been forced to serve for ruthless commanders who had stolen their childhoods. I talked to Fabian who was only 15 when he was forced to join a militia group in the Eastern Congo. He worked as a porter and then was taught how to fight.
Thanks to a Cajed, a UNICEF-funded program in Goma, Fabian has been given a chance to turn his life around. The center provides for emotional and practical support. The children here are taught skills and given a basic education to help them reintegrate with society. The center also managed to trace Fabian’s family and he hopes to go home in the next few weeks.
When the children leave this center, they join other vulnerable kids to learn real-life skills; I saw children learning how to bake bread, make furniture and even repair old stereos. Though it might seem modest, they are learning practical skills for the real world that will help them in their new life.
In the afternoon we visited Heal Africa, a hospital supported by UNICEF to provide medical and psychosocial support to survivors of sexual violence in North Kivu. The Heal Africa team also goes out into the field to get emergency care to the worst cases of rape. The hospital is the first in eastern Congo to provide pediatric care for HIV-positive children and children with disabilities.
All three of these groundbreaking programs are funded 100% by UNICEF.
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| © U.S. Fund for UNICEF/2007/McKenzie |
| UNICEF Ambassador Lucy Liu kneads dough with young bakers at a UNICEF-supported skills center in Goma, DR Congo. |
For more information visit: unicefusa.org/drc
Donate now to support UNICEF's work in the DRC: unicefusa.org/donate/drc
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| © U.S. Fund for UNICEF/2007/David McKenzie |
The center was established as a reminder to Rwanda and the world of the horrors of genocide in an attempt to stop history from repeating itself. The first floor retraces the history of Rwanda and the events leading up to the genocide, and details the heinous event itself.
The second floor touched me deeply as there is an area devoted to children who were killed in the genocide. As a living tribute to the hundreds of thousands of children who were murdered in a ninety day period, it was especially moving to read about the individual lives of some of these children.
They lead normal lives like any other children but were senselessly cut short. Some were hacked to death by machetes, others were bludgeoned by clubs. Particularly chilling was the story of a young boy who came across another child whose legs had been hacked off. The boy tried to carry his wounded friend but was forced to leave him behind when they came under assault again. The boy cries all day at the memory of this and the subsequent murder of the boy he tried to save.
Following the nightmare of the genocide in Rwanda, the people of the DR Congo across the border have also bourne the consequences. Since 1998, conflict in the DR Congo has contributed to the deaths of an estimated 4 million people, half of them children. This makes DR Congo the deadliest conflict on earth since World War II.
We’re now driving to the DR Congo border to spend a week investigating the impact of the conflict on children.
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| © U.S. Fund for UNICEF/2007/Lisa Szarkowski |
| Lucy Liu and Luciano Calestini, UNICEF emergency specialist, at the Rwanda Genocide Memorial |
For more information visit: unicefusa.org/drc
Donate now to support UNICEF's work in the DRC: unicefusa.org/donate/drc
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You probably already have an IM account, right? Well, today we want to share a new way you can use IM to help children around the world. Window’s Live Messenger’s i'm Initiative is a simple new way for UNICEF supporters to give back in the course of your every day communication with friends, families and coworkers.
Click here to sign up for i’m, select UNICEF as the organization you'd like to support, and Microsoft will donate a percentage of the program’s ad revenue to UNICEF every time you have an instant messaging conversation. Also, when you select the UNICEF display icon, others will see that you’re passionate about saving children’s lives every time you chat.
So far, UNICEF’s supporters have been the busiest, logging the most IM sessions of all 10 charities. So if you’re already signed up, thank you and keep spreading the word!
We received positive feedback from two buyers. That puts us at 20% of the way to our yellow star, so please leave feedback if you are pleased with your purchase.
We are in the beginning stages of setting-up our unicef-idc page to better reflect who UNICEF is and what we do. I hope the page gives buyers a better understanding of where the money from their purchases goes. Please feel free to comment below if you have any ideas or suggestions.
New items for sale, for UNICEF:
A Long Way Gone is the story of a child soldier
Afghani Lazuli Suite of Tribal Beads
Maternity clothes, as always, for sale by exoticbargain
Thanks again for supporting UNICEF through eBay!
Today, the "acronym of the day" is UNICEF. If you ask anyone here at UNICEF you will quickly find out that it no longer stands for United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, the original full name of the organization when it was formed in 1946.
When UNICEF became a permanent part of the United Nations system in 1953, its name was shortened to the United Nations Children's Fund, reflecting its broader mission of addressing the long-term needs of children and women in developing countries everywhere. However, UNICEF retained its original acronym.
If you asked me what more does UNICEF stand for, or what it means to me, I would say, look at the 2006-2007 Futbol Club Barcelona (FCB) soccer jersey.
Before my first day of work here, I spotted a busboy with a red and blue FCB jersey with UNICEF written across the front. The jersey immediately conjured up re-runs of the team’s superstars in my head, like Ronaldinho faking defenders out of their shoes to score a scissor-kick goal. But then, I wondered, why a soccer team? What does that have to do with the world's leading humanitarian organization for children?
I realized you can think of soccer and children’s aid as inextricably linked because they are each a kind of life support for millions across the globe. Soccer is a global movement, a way of bridging gaps across social classes, language, cultures, etc. It breathes life and dreams into children, just as a vaccine allows a child to think about a future, not a fate.
Fortunate nations, organizations and people share the duty of helping the less fortunate. When I saw UNICEF front and center on FCB’s jersey, it made me understand that this soccer team is a sports organization which stands up to its motto: More than a club. UNICEF, likewise, is more than a charity. FCB and UNICEF keep children in the poorest regions of the world alive and instill confidence in a better future.
They each understand that helping others is more than just injecting money into poor communities. What soccer and aid organizations both do is restore hope where it has been attacked, whether by man or natural catastrophe. Hope for a fruitful future will take a child farther than money can. The FCB-UNICEF soccer jersey reminds us that everyone is capable of carrying out such acts of humanity, even if we don’t have millions of dollars.
Today we visited a goverment-supported hosptial that cares for both children and adults, but we visited the children's ward where it is estimated that over 70% of all children admitted have been infected withh or exposed to HIV. The conditions were not like our hopitals in the US and we learned some of their challenges, as well as how UNICEF helps support the hospital. We had brought drawings from children in the US and we gave them to the children in the hospital.
All in all, it has been an amazing trip, learning about the situation here in Swaziland and putting faces and places with the facts we had learned. Now that we have been here it is clear that our role is more than just saying we should help, but it is getting the word out to our fello Key Clubbers to raise funds.
- Amanda, Joe, Grace and Rob
UNICEF Ambassador Lucy Liu will visit UNICEF projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo next week. If you have questions for Lucy Liu about the DR Congo and her trip there, please post them in the comments section of this post. She will post answers to some of your questions here. I'm sure she would appreciate your wishes for a productive, safe field visit too.
A long and brutal civil war in the DR Congo ended in 2003, but the people of the DR Congo are still struggling:
• Children who were associated with armed groups during the conflict now need help to re-enter society, re-connect with their families, and get back in school.
• Women and children who suffered horrifying violence during the conflict need psychological and medical care.
• Less than half the population has access to clean water. Diarrhea and other water-borne diseases are a constant threat.
Please visit unicefusa.org/drc to learn more about our work in the DR Congo or make a donation to support UNICEF's lifesaving work in the region.
It's an exciting moment for us. Everything we listed on eBay last week has sold! It's a 100% success rate in our short eBay life.
So onward and upward... we've listed some new items, one in particular I think is a great buy: New York Philharmonic Historic Broadcasts 1923 to 1987. It is up for bid at $9.99 and the Philharmonic website will show you that is a deal!
We also want to thank our new Mission Fish - Giving Works sellers. We've had 11 new sellers register in the past two weeks! Some of them already have items up for sale:
leen9559
exoticbargain
Nor can we forget our top two sellers who always seem to be there for UNICEF:
youngflutes
chicagoetc
P.S. Stamp collectors be prepared! At the moment, we're sorting through maybe over 10,000 UN stamps (from all over the world) to sell on eBay soon!
Four Key Club Ambassadors to UNICEF are visiting projects in Swaziland and blogging about their experience. Below is their fifth post.
Today we observed a mobile health team giving health services to the children who attend the neighborhood care point (NCP). An NCP is a Swazi innovation created by communites where volunteers provide food, basic education, and health services to children who have been orphaned or made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS. Because of neighborhood care points, our staff member told us, children living with grandparents, or on thier own, now become visibile and have a better chance for suvivial into adulthood.
The children got Vitamin A and other supplements, were weighed, and were given other health services.All the information was recorded in a log. If a child is determined that they need more assistance, the nurses either provide medicine right there or they take the child to a clinic or hospital. We met with nurses who visit as many as 7 NCPs a day. This photo shows a child being weighed and one getting registered.
- Amanda
Four Key Club Ambassadors to UNICEF are visiting projects in Swaziland and blogging about their experience. Below is their fourth post.
Today in Swaziland we visited a neighborhood care point and traveled to the home of one of the children we met there. He is being raised by his grandmother. We asked her what her hopes were for her grandchildren, and she told us she wanted schooling, clothing, food, and for them to live to be adults. When I listened to her say this, all I could think of was what my parents would have said if asked the same question.
We moved on to a household headed by a 16-year-old girl taking care of two younger children. Even though we couldn't speak the same language, we bonded with them by playing games. Pictured here are all of us with this family.
-Grace
Welcome to my first post as a volunteer with UNICEF! I'll be writing about where and why children need our help, how they can get it, and in what forms they need it.
I for one have a lot to learn about how money and supplies reach some of our world’s most vulnerable kids. Rest assured that what I learn here at UNICEF USA, I will share with you, the reader. The responsibility to give to others rests in all of our hands.
Today in one of our conference rooms, we has a presentation from Modeste Yameogo, a Communications Officer from UNICEF's office in Burkina Faso, a land-locked West African nation formerly known as Upper Volta. The country has faced political turmoil, the blight of HIV/AIDS, rebel-induced chaos and hardships of nature’s design.
By association, it is easy to lump Burkina Faso with other African nations. This assumption wrongly shaped my expectations of how Mr. Yameogo was going to shape his talk about what his home is like.
He immediately struck me as a proud, committed and optimistic man who is dedicated to the future of Burkina Faso, the children and the improvement of women’s rights. While Burkina Faso faces enormous challenges in the forms of debt, disease and draught, there are several reasons to remain optimistic.
Burkina Faso is not enveloped in violence as are other West African countries. Satellite schools are better located, so that more children can receive an education and opportunity to rise out of poverty. Many young girls are attending school, and are recovering from a long tradition of second-class treatment, mainly defined by the practice of genital mutilation.
By the end of the talk, I did not feel like asking the questions I had prepared in advance. They were based on getting an assessment of the negatives: AIDS, violence, corruption, child labor, etc. Instead, I wanted to know how we can capitalize on the positives. How can more schools be built? Who will maintain them? And who will help maintain the water wells that UNICEF helps build with citizens?
I'm not blinding myself to the problems that Burkina Faso faces. But just because it's nearly last on the Human Development Index does't mean it should be left aside. Often, I think we subconsciously block the toughest humanitarian challenges out of our mind to fix the smaller ones in hope that we will gain the confidence and experience to crack the tougher challenges. This type of thinking breeds inaction.
Modeste Yameogo is aware that being pessimistic is dangerous in today’s world. Mr. Yameogo referenced John F. Kennedy's famous “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Mr. Yameogo’s point was that we all need to work, and we need to work together for an outcome.
Four Key Club Ambassadors to UNICEF are visiting projects in Swaziland and blogging about their experience. Below is their third post. The photo below is of a child they met at a UNICEF-supported neighborhood care point where children come everyday for food, health services, and some basic education.
Today was our first day of site visits in Swaziland. We had learned a lot in advance about what we were going to see, but even so, we weren't sure how it would affect us. And sure enough, we all came away impacted, but in the complete opposite way than we imagined. Seeing UNICEF programs that support children was very inspiring and made us realize that children are happy no matter where they live; the attitude is the same as children we see every day. However, it is the influence of a positive program that truly makes a difference in their lives.
The day was amazing and made us feel that what we are doing is making a difference.
- Rob
After many eventful hours on four planes, we have arrived at our destination of Mbabane, the capital of Swaziland. Amanda, Grace, Rob and I (the four Key Club Ambassadors to UNICEF) have found Swaziland to be different than what we expected. It is clear to us after seeing children of all ages walking home from school that these children need our help more than they need our sympathy.
-Joe
