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.