Fieldnotes: Blogging on UNICEF's child survival work in the field

Tomorrow is World AIDS Day.

For too long, children have been the missing face in the HIV and AIDS response and their needs are often overlooked. But they are the ones who offer the greatest hope for defeating the epidemic.

Mother-to-child transmission is the primary cause of HIV infection in children. And it is preventable. HIV test kits can help stop the transmission of HIV to unborn children. This holiday season, you can purchase an HIV test kit in yours or someone else's name and help stop the spread of AIDS.

Another way to make a big impact: give a gift that helps immunize children against deadly childhood diseases. Vaccination works: The Measles Initiative just announced that through global efforts measles deaths in Africa have fallen 91 percent since 2000!

For $23, you can buy enough measles vaccine to vaccinate 50 children. $40 can buy a bicycle that will allow field workers to deliver vaccines to remote villages. And $560 can buy a cold box to store vaccines in the hottest climates.

Check out our Inspired Gifts shop to learn more about giving gifts that help UNICEF save children's lives.

UNICEF is all about children. So our partners have come up with some gifts for the kids on your holiday gift list. If you purchase any of our Gifts that Give, part--or all--of that purchase price will benefit UNICEF.

Here are just a few of our Gifts that Give:

IKEA Soft Toys. For every soft toy you buy at IKEA during the holiday season, IKEA will donate $1 to be split between the U.S. Fund for UNICEF and Save the Children. Toys range in price from 99 cents to $19.99.

ATP “Feder-bear” Beanie Baby. Roger Federer, UNICEF's Goodwill Ambassador and the world’s Number 1 Tennis Player, is now also a Beanie Baby! For every one of these specially designed plush bears purchased for $8, ATP will donate $5 to its ACE partnership program with UNICEF, helping children around the world.

You can even donate Pampers Rewards Points. If you’re a member of the Pampers Gifts to Grow Rewards program, you can donate your points to UNICEF. For every point you give, Pampers will donate 5 cents to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF to help provide life-saving tetanus vaccines to pregnant women.

And don't forget UNICEF's online shop, where you can buy children's games, puzzles, toys, books, and videos. So give a gift that helps save a child's life.

UNICEF is making it possible for you to purchase some of the products it uses in emergencies like the Bangladesh cyclone to save kids' lives.

You can buy these items either in your own name, or give them as a gift in someone else’s name. For example, for $22 you can give oral rehydration salts (pictured here) that can save a child from dehydration. For $30 you can give high-protein biscuits, developed especially for emergency situations. And for $305 you can purchase an emergency health kit that provides three months of health care for 1,000 people.

Visit our Inspired Gifts store to see how to purchase these and other lifesaving gifts.

This holiday season, give an Inspired Gift and help save a child’s life.

Children have been especially affected by the devastating cyclone that hit the Bangladesh coast on November 15. We've been reporting on UNICEF's emergency response, and below is a series of images that illustrates one young girl's experience in the aftermath of the cyclone: Lisa, a nine-year-old in the village of Amua.

If you want to donate to support relief efforts to save kids' lives, click here.

© UNICEF/HQ07-1809/Shehzad Noorani

Above, Lisa stands near her home. Amua is in Barisal District, one of the areas hardest hit in the storm. Below, she's gathering wood debris from the house. It can't be used for rebuilding, but can be used as fuel for cooking.

© UNICEF/HQ07-1811/Shehzad Noorani

Below, Lisa stands with a younger brother and her grandmother in front of her uncle’s house. They survived the cyclone by standing with her uncle’s family on a platform under the roof of the house.

© UNICEF/HQ07-1812/Shehzad Noorani

Lisa helps her father lay fishing nets, and is also taking care of the younger children in her family.

© UNICEF/HQ07-1814/Shehzad Noorani

© UNICEF/HQ07-1817/Shehzad Noorani

We'll share more photos from Bangladesh as they come in...

Some very important people were recently honored here in our New York office: the winners of the Pier 1/UNICEF/Weekly Reader greeting card contest! Here they are with U.S. Fund for UNICEF President Caryl Stern: Karen Hong (age 13), Shone Williams (age 8), and Josephine Kao (age 11).

The cards they designed will be sold exclusively at Pier 1 Imports stores through the holiday season. Each pack of ten cards costs $10, and Pier 1 is donating 100% of the sale price to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF! So your money goes directly towards helping save children’s lives.

UNICEF started selling greeting cards in 1949, when a 7-year-old girl gave a painting to UNICEF to express her gratitude for the aid given to her war-torn Czech village. Congratulations to our young winners, who are carrying on this tradition.

Meet a member of UNICEF’s MTV Generation! One of our dedicated volunteers, Andrea, now has her very own video profile featured on mtvU.com.

Here’s Andrea’s clip.

Andrea's currently president of a UNICEF Campus Initiative group at the University of Southern California to help raise awareness and support for UNICEF. The Campus Initiative is a group of like-minded students who want to help children in need survive. The group partners with the U.S. Fund for UNICEF (that’s us) to educate, advocate, and fundraise for UNICEF.

If you’re a student who wants to help children, click here to see if there’s a Campus Initiative you can join. If there isn’t, you can start one. Click here for info on how to start and run your group. And be a part of the generation that helps eliminate preventable deaths of children.

Today is National Philanthropy Day, a time to "consider the impact of the charitable sector and the increasing role it plays in our societies and countries around the world... Connecting individuals to causes, and to each other. Fostering civic participation. Improving the quality of life for all people."

Here at UNICEF USA we're taking a short break to celebrate the tremendous impact our supporters have had over the years, enabling UNICEF to save more children's lives than any other humanitarian organization.

Thank you.

Yes, the holidays are pretty much here.

And that means cards to write, meals to make, traffic to navigate—and gifts to give. But does your niece really need another doll? And doesn’t your bookworm friend get all his reading material at the local library anyway? How about giving a gift that really matters--a gift that can help save a child's life.

UNICEF USA has launched a new online store called Inspired Gifts.These are lifesaving items that you purchase in your own or in someone else’s name that will go directly to children in need in one of the 150+ countries where UNICEF works. They range from vaccines, to protein biscuits, to recreation kits. So now you can show your niece the true meaning of the holiday season, give your friend the gift of making a difference, and, best of all, give a child the gift of life.

We’ll be highlighting all of the Inspired Gifts and other special shopping opportunities on this blog throughout the holdiday season. To get you started, how about 2 insecticide-treated mosquito nets for $15?

In Africa, a child dies from malaria every 30 seconds. A mosquito net can lower the rate of infection by 50 percent. Just $15 buys two repellant-treated mosquito nets that can save a child’s life. That's pretty simple math.

We arrived in Cuidad de Carmen, a city island on the Gulf Coast of Mexico at 9:00 on the morning of Thursday, November 8th. I’m part of a UNICEF delegation dispatched from Mexico City to assess the situation in the Mexican state of Tabasco after torrential rains caused the worst flooding the region’s seen in more than 50 years.

Local authorities estimate that 80 percent of the state has been affected by the floods. This percentage accounts for approximately one million people, of which at least 200,000 are children.

Others in the delegation included Daniel Camazón (UNICEF Mexico), William Marshall (UNICEF Mexico), Guillermo Alonso Angulo and Samantha Vernis Richaud from Investigacion Educacion Popular Autogestiva (IEPA), an NGO based in the region that works with UNICEF to provide psychosocial services to children in emergency situations.

The two-hour drive from Cuidad de Carmen to Tabasco’s capital city of Villahermosa is a scenic one that cuts through a pastoral landscape of rolling hills, rivers and ranches with grazing livestock. As we neared Villahermosa however, the scenery became less idyllic.

The roads leading into the capital city are caked with mud and strewn with ruptured sandbags. The debris are grim markers of where flood waters have receded. Fifty percent of the city however still remains under water.

Also lining the streets on the city’s outskirts are clusters of families who refuse to leave their badly damaged homes. Many have rigged makeshift shelters from cardboard and tarpaulin to cover what meager belongings they’ve managed to salvage.

The state government under the auspices of the Integrated Family Development office (DIF) is currently operating 150 shelters (or albergues) within the capital city. Thirty-seven thousand residents have been relocated to 276 temporary shelters in Tabasco and more than 10,000 were relocated to temporary shelters in the adjacent state of Veracruz.

Here's a young boy collecting supplies at one of these shelters.

I'm now writing from our hotel—which doesn’t seem to have sustained any damage from the floods. The lobby is abuzz with activity but not of the tourist variety—the hotel appears to have been converted into a to control center of sorts for aid workers representing the Mexican government, UN agencies and other non-governmental organizations.

Our group is organizing a plan of action for the rest of the week. Tomorrow we meet with Luis Manuel Hernández Govea, Director General of DIF. More to follow.

On Friday, our last day in Brazil, we met UNICEF's NGO partners working within some of the poor neighborhoods or favelas of Rio de Janeiro. We also had the opportunity to talk with some of the adolescents who are working to improve their neighborhoods. I read that it is estimated that up to 20% of Rio's population lives in the favelas, which are plagued by violence between the gangs and drug dealers that dominate these neighborhoods and the police. Children are frequently caught in the middle and unable to attend school when the violence erupts.

UNICEF and its partners are working with adolescents to conduct research on what the biggest issues are within these neighborhoods and their suggestions for improvement. The results of their research will be presented at a public hearing with city officials for changes to be implemented.

I was struck by the challenges that these kids must overcome to attend school. One teenager told us about the struggle to get bus transportation to school. While free bus cards are provided, the private bus company maintains a quota for how many free riders can be on the bus at any given time. The quota is 3. This presents a serious obstacle to getting to school. I'm hopeful that their research work will help to change problems such as this one.

We had an amazing experience this morning with children in the Nova Iguaçu community, a very poor area south of Rio de Janeiro. Theirs is one in which UNICEF and the community are coming together to develop a neighborhood concept for schools that is dramatically changing education for children and reducing violence. In this community the project divides childrens´ school day in two parts: class time and activities. The activities are all located within the community and may include swimming lessons in the pool of one of the residents or work on a film project at the film school nearby. All of the activities are walking distance and the path is marked on the sidewalk with red paint. The community even mobilized to change the traffic patterns and placement of street vendors to improve childrens´ access to the various places on the ``campus``. We visited with elementary students participating in a drawing workshop as well as teenagers at the film project where we were able to see short films they had written and created. We were all incredibly impressed and thrilled to hear that this neighborhood school concept is active in 20 communities and plans are in place to scale up to 80 by next year.

I am having trouble posting photographs from the computer I am working on, but will try to post some on Saturday if I don´t have luck before then. So please check back then!

We have been so fortunate to meet so many people who are willing to share stories from their lives with us while we are here in Brazil. Yesterday we met the staff at GAPA-Bahia (AIDS Prevention and Assistance Group of Bahia), a local NGO in Salvador that provides support for children and their families who are living with HIV/AIDS. This NGO, which is supported by UNICEF, provides critical psychosocial support to children beyond the medical treatment. Here we met children ages 6 to 12 in a play room at the center. They come here to play games and tell stories that help them express themselves and discuss themes in their everyday lives. The children were clearly enjoying themselves in the play room judging from the shrieks of laughter and other noises coming from the room during our meeting! We had the chance to meet some of them and talk with them in the play room - a great experience for both of us.

After our visit and some minor delays, we arrived safely in Rio de Janeiro last night. We are off this morning to meet students at a local school. I will try to write again this evening and post more photos from our visits.

KM

© U.S. Fund for UNICEF/Mangelinkx

Celia with her water tank.

This morning we were up early to visit the homes of families participating in a couple of different projects that UNICEF and its partners are working on in this region of Brazil. One project that is changing the lives of families here is the Million Water Tanks project - an initiative of the government, UNICEF, and other partners to provide the materials and training to families to build and maintain their own water tank that would provide them with water for cooking and drinking during the 8 months of the dry season. The tank filters and collects water during the rainy season that can sustain the family during the harshest months of the year. We met Celia, who participated in the training and now has the ability to provide her family of 6 with water, saving her the time of collecting water from the well - a task that could take up to 4 hours for some families here.

We also visited, Maria, who participated in a program that provides families with goats and training to care for them. Through the program, Maria has begun a breeding program that has provided her family with enough income to purchase additional acres of land and a new home in their community.

We returned to Salvador this evening and are resting up for more visits in the morning and our trip to Rio. I will write again tomorrow evening. Please post your comments and questions!

After a long drive yesterday afternoon and a meeting with UNICEF´s NGO partners in the Conceicao do Coite community in the semi-arid region, we arrived at a school that is working to prevent child labor through extended hours and a reading program, called the Reading Chest.
The government is working with UNICEF and its partners to grow this program which provides a stipend to families whose children participate. The stipend provided is equivalent or more to what a child would be making working on one of the farms or in a factory. Instead the children engage in a program that improves their reading skills and focuses on issues around three main themes: identity of their community, the relationship to nature and the environment, and their rights as citizens. The children performed songs, dances, and gave readings in honor of our visit. Most of all, we loved the opportunity we had to sit on the floor with them and talk about their favorite books, their lives, and their hopes for the future. It was the perfect start to our visit here in Brazil.

Our group with children participating in the Reading Chest program.

If you’ve read our advocacy alert on cluster munitions, you know that unexploded cluster munitions pose a major risk for children.

That's why the U.S. Fund for UNICEF supports S. 594, the Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act. This legislation would prevent the United States from using or exporting cluster munitions with a failure rate of more than one percent, and would ensure that U.S. cluster munitions will only be used against clearly defined military targets—not in civilian areas.

Unfortunately, at present S. 594 only has 12 cosponsors. That's not enough to show the bipartisan commitment needed for the Senate to vote on this legislation.

Today is the Global Day of Action on Cluster Munitions and we're participating in a national call-in day in support of S. 594. Please join us and let your Senators know that Americans care about the use of these inhumane weapons. It's easy:

• Call the toll-free number (800-352-1897) during regular business hours (Eastern time!), to connect to the Capitol Switchboard.
• Ask for one of your Senator’s offices: “May I speak with Senator ___’s office?”
• When connected, say:
  • My name is ______, and I live in [CITY, STATE]. Thanks for taking my call.
  • I'm calling to ask Senator _______ to cosponsor S. 594, the Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act. This is important to me, to help protect children around the world. Please let me know if the Senator will cosponsor this legislation.
  • Thank you!

Then repeat the process for your other Senator.

That’s it! Hearing from constituents is very important for our federal legislators – your call today can help protect children from cluster munitions.

Please use the comments below to let us know who you've called and how it goes.

We arrived safely in the Northeast coastal city of Salvador yesterday afternoon. After checking in to our hotel, we toured the city and learned much about its rich history. Salvador was a major port for slaves arriving from West Africa and today approximately 85% of the population is of African descent. Slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888 and its influence can still be seen today in the mixture of cultural and religious practices of the city´s residents.

This morning we are getting ready to greet our UNICEF colleagues and travel with them to visit a UNICEF-supported program for AIDS prevention and support for children. We will also drive to Feira de Santana (1 hour west of Salvador) to see a community mobilization program before driving another 2 hours to Conceicao do Coite. This community is one in which UNICEF is working to develop an integrated and sustainable approach to programming that involves the entire community.

We will be spending the evening in Conceicao do Coite so that we can begin visits first thing in the morning. I will probably not have internet access until tomorrow evening, so more then.

My name is Kristen Mangelinkx and I work in the Boston office of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF. On Saturday, I will be traveling to Brazil for the week to visit UNICEF's programs in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Conceicao do Coite, a rural area that is a several hour drive from Salvador.

Although Brazil is considered a middle-income country, approximately 50 million people still live in poverty. While infant mortality rates are declining and improvements in living conditions, child healthcare, and nutrition are being made, the progress is not spread equally throughout the country. Deaths of children in the Northeast region where we will be traveling are twice as high as those in other parts of the country.

UNICEF's programs in Brazil are focused on improving access to healthcare for vulnerable children, developing quality education and reducing drop-out rates, improving access to services for mothers and children with HIV/AIDS, and protecting children from violence. On this trip we will be able to see these programs in both an urban and rural context.

I will try to write daily about our visits and answer questions that are posted, so please visit the blog each day and send me your questions!

KM