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

Recently, I had a great conversation with Shanelle Hall, director of UNICEF's Supply Division. As if I didn't know it already, she really gave me a vivid sense of how many essential, lifesaving supplies UNICEF gets to children all over the globe, every day.

In 2007, for example, we shipped enough educational kits to supply over 12 million children and 100,000 teachers. We procured 3.2 billion doses of vaccine, at a value of $617 million—that's enough for 40 percent of the world's children. But, as massive as these achievements are, we're always thinking about the children we haven't yet reached: children who don't have the tools they need to learn, or who are dying from a disease that 27 cents worth of vaccine could have prevented.

© UNICEF/ HQ05-1695/Josh Estey

INDONESIA: A girl holds a UNICEF school kit bearing outside her new school in Banda Aceh, capital of Aceh Province. The school kit contains workbooks, pencils, pens, crayons, rulers and sharpeners.

You may have gotten an email recently about becoming an online monthly donor. If you aren't on our email list, you can read about it here. Regularly scheduled giving—where you commit to an ongoing monthly, quarterly or yearly donation paid automatically through your credit card—is a godsend to us. It makes it easier to sustain those programs that kids around the world need so badly. Because there are always new babies to vaccinate, and there are always children who want and need to learn.

Scheduled giving also saves us tons of money on fundraising, which means more money going straight to helping kids. And it means we're not sending you regular paper mailings, asking you to renew a pledge (this, of course, has the added bonus of saving trees).

A new television series, “Long Way Down,” featuring actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman, makes its US television premiere on Fox Reality Channel this Saturday, August 2 at 9 pm (ET/PT). Check local listings for details.

UNICEF is the official charity for "Long Way Down." During their journey from Scotland to South Africa, Ewan and Charley stopped off to visit UNICEF projects to raise awareness and funds for children.

Local jazz musicians raise $3,718 for Iraqi children

Philip Crawford of Monterey, California recently coordinated his third fundraising effort for UNICEF. He recruited musicians from Monterey and San Francisco to play a concert devoted to Duke Ellington, an influential jazz musician who performed from 1923 until 1974. Eleven musicians donated their talents for the evening, including Andy Weiss, the drummer who played with Ellington’s orchestra, and Kenny Stahl, a flautist who previously toured with Stevie Wonder.

On a Wednesday night in May, 65 people attended a benefit jazz concert at Monterey Live, a music venue in the downtown area. Attendees paid a $25 cover for the show and all proceeds were donated to UNICEF. Throughout the concert Philip spoke of the conditions Iraqi children are faced with and how extra donations would benefit them. The largest donation was $1000, given by an Iraqi attendee, while a $300 donation was made by the local Rotary Club.

© UNICEF/ HQ03-0486/Shehzad Noorani

IRAQ: Three boys hold up slates with slogans and pictures, in a class in the Medina Al-Mudon primary school in Baghdad. The text reads “Long live our country. Long live Iraq. Long live the people.” The slate and other materials being used by the children are from a UNICEF-supplied School-in-a-Box kit. The kits, each of which contains sufficient basic materials for one teacher and 80 students, were distributed for use by up to 100,000 children in Baghdad.

Currently in Iraq, only 40 percent of children have access to clean drinking water on a daily basis, and only half of all school-aged children attend school regularly.

In 2007, UNICEF delivered school supplies to 4.7 million Iraqi children, as well as 150 million gallons of drinking water and 4.5 million vaccinations.

If you'd also like to help support UNICEF's work for the children of Iraq, make an online donation here.

Vaccination drives can take a lot of work: running public service announcements, coordinating health workers, planning events, etc. On top of these logistical challenges, organizers sometimes face unexpected hurdles like misconceptions about vaccines that stop people from getting lifesaving immunizations.

In Egypt, where UNICEF has been trying to protect mothers and babies from tetanus, many women had heard false rumors that the vaccines acted as contraceptives or caused sterilization. As a result, a lot of women refused to be immunized, putting themselves and their future children at risk. This presented a troubling situation for Egyptian health officials who were trying to curb the disease.

But UNICEF tackled the problem with a creative, grassroots approach. UNICEF and its partners trained 5,000 local Egyptian women to serve as community liaisons and educate their relatives and neighbors about the benefits of immunization.

© UNICEF/HQ05-1568/Giacomo Pirozzi

UNICEF trains women in Egypt to combat two threats to survival—misinformation and superstition. Thanks to the innovative training program, Egypt is close to eliminating maternal and neonatal tetanus

On Friday, the United Nations issued a new appeal for international aid to assist with earthquake recovery efforts in central China. The aid sought will be used across UN agencies, including UNICEF, to support mid to long-term recovery and reconstruction efforts in earthquake-affected areas.

© UNICEF/ HQ08-0627/Adam Dean

UNICEF Water and Environmental Sanitation Specialist Yang Zhenbo is surrounded by students at a primary school in the town of Danjing Shan, Sichuan Province, China. Yang is assessing related needs in the area. UNICEF will provide water-purification equipment at the school, which was damaged during the earthquake. Students are now attending classes in a temporary school on the grounds.

The total appeal amounts to $33.5 million for the period of July to December 2008. UNICEF's portion of this appeal totals $6.7 million—which will fund just the first phase of UNICEF's three-year recovery plan for the region.

	© UNICEF/HQ95-0154/Shankar
	INDIA: A child bride attends the celebrations leading up to her wedding in the Rajgarh District of Madhya Pradesh State.

Recently, two young girls made a very big stir in Yemen. Nujood, who is ten, and Arwa, nine, gained national attention when they very publicly left their husbands. Yes, you read correctly—they left their husbands. Both girls were married to much older men—marriages arranged by their families.

In Yemen—and a shocking number of other countries around the world—child marriage remains a widely accepted practice, especially in very poor and rural areas. There are a bunch of reasons parents may choose to marry off their daughters when they are quite young. Struggling, hungry families may decide they'd be better off with one fewer mouth to feed. Parents may think an early marriage will protect their daughters from random sexual assault. Or they may see these marriages as a way to ensure their daughters won't become pregnant out of wedlock.

One thing is certain—for so many young girls, child marriage crushes their ability to create their own future. Young married girls usually stop attending school. They often become isolated from their family and friends, with playtime replaced by household chores. Girls married at a young age also face serious health risks from pregnancy and childbirth—a girl under age 16 is five times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than a woman between the ages of 20 to 24.

UNICEF Ambassador Clay Aiken recently visited the East African countries of Somalia and Kenya, where UNICEF provides children with health care, education, nutrition, clean water and sanitation. This is the last in a series of blog posts he has written about his experience in the field.

In early July, after visiting Somalia, I traveled to Eldoret, in Kenya’s Rift Valley, to visit camps for internally displaced people. This is where some of the worst violence took place following the Kenya elections in early 2008. Thousands of children were made homeless by the unrest.

Everywhere we went, there were the charcoaled remains of homes, schools and shops. We drove for hours and everywhere we went, we saw people trying to get their lives restored.

© US Fund for UNICEF / 2008 / Nick Ysenburg

Although many schools were re-opened, far fewer children are turning up for class than before. And classes are taking place in schools that have been completely destroyed. I saw children sitting on rocks and bricks—which used to make up the foundations and roofs of their schools—using them now as desks and chairs.

Earlier this month, I posted an entry on this blog about girls in Darfur being sexually assaulted when they collect firewood in the wilderness. One of our readers left a question that may have crossed many people’s minds: “How about letting the MEN collect the firewood?!”

When I first researched this subject, I also wondered why girls in Darfur were left to do this risky chore in secluded areas while boys stayed behind at camp. But I later learned that boys in war-torn countries also suffer horrible abuse, violence and exploitation.

In Darfur, when militias raid villages, they sometimes immediately execute the boys along with the men. In times of war, many fighting groups see young men and boys as threats or as potential soldiers, so boys are either killed or kidnapped and forced to serve in militias.

© UNICEF/ HQ05-1018/Ron Haviv

Lucky to be alive, three nomadic boys wander amid the remains of a village reputed to harbour Janjaweed militias in North Darfur State, Sudan. But until these boys relocate to a protected camp for displaced people, their lives remain in great danger.

	© Elizabeth de Velasco, 2008

U.S. Fund for UNICEF staff member Elizabeth de Velasco recently traveled to UNICEF's main supply division warehouse in Copenhagen, Denmark, and filed this report.

Sure, there’s a warehouse the size of three football fields. But more than that, the UNICEF staff at the supply division in Copenhagen have an expertise in the procurement, shipment and use of international development supplies.

	© Elizabeth de Velasco, 2008

For example, the government of Sudan requested that UNICEF manage the supplies needed for its census. UNICEF dispatched Omar, a warehouse employee. He spent five weeks there making sure that there were enough pencils, paper, boxes and trucks for the census to function throughout Sudan—which is roughly the size of western Europe, but insecure and with weak infrastructure.

Another warehouse staff member, John, develops innovative ways to pack and distribute supplies in conflict and post-conflict situations. In a Back-to-School campaign in Afghanistan a few years ago, John figured out how to get the education supplies to all of the new schoolchildren from an Aghanistan supply center. But women and men could not work side-by-side, so John just rigged up a bedsheet to partition the room, and work was able to commence.

	© Elizabeth de Velasco, 2008

While the Copenhagen warehouse stores less than ten percent of UNICEF’s supplies—the rest get shipped directly from producers to the UNICEF country offices—it does have the items that are most essential to have on hand for emergencies: buckets, blankets, protein biscuits, School-in-a-Box kits, recreation kits, health kits and more. And then UNICEF gets them anywhere in the world in fewer than 48 hours.

In my last post, I told you all about the i'm Talkathon, a project started by an i'm Initiative fan named Parker to help raise awareness about this incredible program from Microsoft that donates to a social cause every time you send an IM or email. UNICEF is one of the causes, and there are just five days left in the Talkathon!

In these final days, there's a simple way you can help raise awareness for UNICEF and possibly even help us win a big donation from the social netoworking site Facebook. Facebook has pledged $15,000 to the social cause that gets the most votes in their i'm Initiative poll.

Here’s the deal: On the "i’m Making a Difference" Group page (www.facebook.com/im), look for the poll on the right margin. Simply vote for your favorite cause. You can see the results in real time.

UNICEF is currently in third place. Help make us #1! Rally your friends. Get out the vote. The more friends who get behind UNICEF, the better we will do. That's what community is all about.

And let's have a round of applause for Facebook's generous pledge. Very cool.

Not long ago, my very curious niece asked me to explain UNICEF's work. I told her about child survival issues, about how, in certain parts of the world, kids get sick and even die from things that she will never have to worry about: they don't have clean water, don't get enough to eat, come down with pneumonia…

© UNICEF/ HQ06-2554/Giacomo Pirozzi

A baby with severe pneumonia lies in the pediatric ward of a hospital in the Solomon Islands. He has a breathing tube in his nose and an intravenous needle taped to his hand.

"Pneumonia!" she said. "Isn't that what old people get when they go outside in winter without a coat?" She's not alone in imagining pneumonia as an elderly man in a wheelchair, coughing quietly from the dim corner of a nursing home. Would you be as shocked as she was to learn that pneumonia is the number one killer of children under five? That more children die from pneumonia than from AIDS, malaria and measles combined?

At this year’s annual Key Club International Convention in Denver, Colorado, our four new ambassadors dressed up in Halloween costumes that mirrored the characters on the new Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF box.

© US Fund for UNICEF / 2008 / Sheldon

Pictured here are Abigail, Lance, Anna and Jared, who promoted Key Club’s participation in the Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF campaign and the Swazi Children Care Project—a program that helps Swaziland’s children who have been impacted by HIV and AIDS. In addition to creating a costume buzz, Key Clubbers created cards and messages to send to the children of Swaziland, which will be sent later this summer.

Over 1400 Key Club members were in attendance at the four-day long convention, where they not only learned about UNICEF and other partners, but also elected a new president, vice president and leadership board. Stay tuned for more Key Club updates, and let us know what you think of the new box!

UNICEF Ambassador Clay Aiken recently returned from Somalia, where UNICEF provides children in the war-torn nation with health care, education, nutrition, clean water and sanitation. This is the second in a series of blog posts he will write about his experience in the field.

For children in Somalia, the situation is dire. But, it's just amazing to me that UNICEF is still able to make a difference in children’s lives in one of the most dangerous places on earth.

© US Fund for UNICEF / 2008 / Nick Ysenburg

For instance, while I was in northwest Somalia—where 45 percent of the population are children and women—I observed how UNICEF improves water, sanitation and hygiene conditions for everyone in the region. One of the ways they do this is by drilling "borewells" so that clean drinking water is easily accessible and readily available. Without these borewells, children would have to walk hours to fetch water instead of going to school and getting an education.

Usually, all that you'd expect in return for a donation to UNICEF is the deep satisfaction of knowing you've helped some of the world's most vulnerable children who are struggling for survival every day.

But this month, our corporate partner, American Airlines, is offering an added incentive to donate: bonus miles! American Airlines AAdvantage® members who donate $50 or more at www.unicefusa.org/aa will receive a one-time award of 250 AAdvantage bonus miles. Donate $100 or more and earn 500 bonus miles.

Every donation made at www.unicefusa.org/aa will help UNICEF save and improve children's lives in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar and/or the recent earthquake in Sichuan, China.

Donate today, because this special offer only lasts through July 31, 2008.

UNICEF and other aid agencies have warned that a combination of crises in the Greater Horn of Africa—including drought, conflict, disease and rising food and energy prices—is imperiling the lives of children and their families.

A broad array of news organizations has covered the potentially calamitous situations in Ethiopia, Somalia and other countries in the region, focusing particular attention on the threat of malnutrition. Read these reports from IRIN, AllAfrica.com and Bloomberg News.

Here's also a recent UNICEF Television report on malnutrition in Ethiopia:

Have you ever visited a city and been followed down the street by a scrum of children asking for money or pens, or desperately trying to sell you gum or some limp flowers? Our visit last week from UNICEF Laos Child Protection Officer Amy Delneuville got me thinking about one of the world's saddest, most overlooked groups: street children. Here in the U.S., there aren't many street children but in developing countries, poor countries, countries fractured by conflict, there are many.

© UNICEF/ HQ07-0072/Giacomo Pirozzi

A boy sleeps on a cardboard box on the street in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic.

It's impossible to know for certain just how many children spend their time living in the streets. Not surprisingly, it's a very difficult group to track. An estimated number that often pops up, though, is 100 million. If accurate, that's 100 million kids living, working, struggling and sleeping on the streets of cities. I can't imagine what it must feel like to be a kid and not know where you'll sleep that night. Or whether you'll be safe.

UNICEF Ambassador Clay Aiken recently returned from Somalia, where UNICEF provides children in the war-torn nation with health care, education, nutrition, clean water and sanitation. This is the first in a series of blog posts he will write about his experience in the field.

I recently returned from a UNICEF field visit that took me to northwest Somalia. What I saw there was both amazing and heartbreaking. In many ways, the children I was able to meet are doing better than their counterparts in the rest of Somalia. But in other respects, the situation there is still quite serious.

© US Fund for UNICEF / 2008 / Nick Ysenburg

UNICEF Ambassador Clay Aiken with children he met on his recent visit to Somalia.

For starters, the lack of a permanent central government has contributed to Somalia's status as one of the poorest and most volatile countries in the world. Decades of civil conflict have shattered social structures