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| © UNICEF/ HQ06-1461/Giacomo Pirozzi | |
Today I'd like to address one last comment to my original post on child survival. Kathryn Hornbein wrote, "In your comments today, I saw nothing about the issue of conflict and child mortality/morbidity. Yet I think a majority of problems are caused or aggravated by war…."
Even though I'm focusing my posts on certain core child survival issues, I don't want to leave anyone with the impression that UNICEF isn't incredibly dedicated to children impacted by armed conflicts. In fact, UNICEF was created in 1946 to come to the aid of children devastated by WWII. And we've been helping children in war ever since.
Let's take Darfur—the ongoing conflict there has created one of the worst humanitarian crises in history. Over a million children forced to flee their homes are now living in refugee camps in Sudan and Chad. And Kathryn is absolutely correct when she writes that the fallout from such a conflict is massive—lack of clean water and sanitation, malnutrition, destruction of the education infrastructure, increase in disease, compromised health care, land mine danger, etc. The list is depressingly long.
But UNICEF works to address all of these problems. In Darfur, for instance, we've helped over 2.3 million people, or 70 percent of the conflict-affected population, get access to safe drinking water. Since the start of the UNICEF-supported "Go to School" initiative in Southern Sudan, school enrollment has quadrupled and children in the most remote corners of the country have received school supplies (delivered by truck, boat, donkey, and in some cases, very dedicated walkers). We supply vaccines, nutritional supplements, midwifery kits, baby blankets, tents, cooking pots and bowls, insecticide-treated bed nets to reduce malaria…. Sometimes it's hard for me to wrap my head around the massive scope of UNICEF's work in a place like Darfur. I suppose it's a little like looking at the Grand Canyon—difficult to fully grasp. Not to say that we're standing around patting ourselves on the back: there's always more that can be—and needs to be—done.
A few months ago I was able to sit down with Claire Hajaj, UNICEF's Communications Officer for Iraq. UNICEF has continued to work in Iraq, despite the significant danger. Claire told me about UNICEF's efforts in that country to provide (as she said) a "lifeline back to normality." That includes rehabilitating schools, teaching children land mine awareness, and training teachers to provide psychosocial care for children who've seen traumatic events (helping children emotionally heal is something we do in crisis spots around the world—see Annette Apitz's recent post about a former child soldier in Uganda). We're also doing what we can to tackle Iraq's water crisis. UNICEF Iraq has done some amazing work on that front, like recently getting trucks full of drinking water to children and their families in Basra where access to water had been cut due to the heavy fighting there. But, despite UNICEF's success in Iraq, Claire spends a lot of time thinking about how we could be doing more. (I suppose that's the definition of a good aid worker.)
We can't stop conflict (well, sometimes we can temporarily), but we can help children survive its physical and emotional fallout. We always have, and we always will.
How many countries can you name where children are—right now—being impacted by fighting and conflict?