In Haiti, the rainy season is setting in, making rivers in the rubble. Last week, flooding south of the capital killed dozens. With more than a million people homeless and exposed to the elements, the support of the international community is just as crucial today as it was on January 12th.
This week’s Thursday video reminds you of the stories we’ve told you since the quake. Stories of kids like Rodrigue, who lost both his parents and Anne, whose school was destroyed along with her home
Elizabeth Kiem is the online producer for the U.S. Fund for UNICEF
Many years ago I visited Valparaiso, Chile as a member of a wedding party. I was impressed with the food, with the sea and with all the salsa dancing. But what I remember in particular was how the beautiful seaside city had reversed what I think of as a fairly common socioeconomic terrain: here, the wealthier families lived low to the coast among city lights and landscaped boulevards; the poor lived high in the mountains above, along narrow dirt roads that went dark after sunset. I was hosted by the groom’s family, who lived in a modest house with electricity and plumbing halfway up the mountain. From their yard I looked down on the wealth of a nation that has leapt over poverty and dictatorship to become a hemisphere leader. I looked up at the reaches where that prosperity was still felt as a gap.
Warning – you will be humming this melody all day long. /p>
No, really – they’re still humming it in space, where Lullaby, the new UNICEF anthem, was broadcast late last year,and where sound is notoriously long-lived but hard to hear.
This week’s Thursday video brings you the Lullaby reprise. A stunningly gorgeous video bedded with the same swelling theme composed by UNICEF Ambassador Steve Barakatt, “For Every Child” goes out to the children of THIS world – and to the very grounded governments and changemakers who are charged with ensuring the rights enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Jennifer Bakody is an emergency communications specialist in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.She recently visited the Dario Contreras Hospital, which UNICEF is helping to support with doctors and supplies for Haitian children being treated for injuries after last month’s earthquake.
The moment I arrived at the children’s ward of Dario Contreras Hospital, I heard cries from the wounded. About a dozen injured young people lay in one room, some crammed two to a bed. Some had a parent by their side, some were alone. Amputated arms or legs were common, and it looked like almost everyone was in a cast. Blood-stained bandages were wrapped tightly around some heads. Other children were hooked to IV drips with medicines. One little boy had lost an eye.
Casey Rotter is a development officer at the U.S. Fund for UNICEF. She is on a week-long field trip to Guatemala with members of UNICEF’s Next Generation.
Greetings from Guatemala!
We arrived — all fourteen of us Next Geners — in Guatemala City safe and sound! We had a nice group dinner of typical Guatemalan food last night and went to bed early so that we could be refreshed for the early morning activities.
We had our briefing at the UNICEF headquarters where we met all of the fabulous staff! And then had a security briefing to ensure that our stay in Guatemala is safe. Then we were off to see our first Unicef-funded program.
We went to Roosevelt Hospital and visited their prenatal programs and emergency prenatal and birthing services. Unicef funds 40% of the program — including funding for staff, training, supplies, food, drugs and vaccines, as well as testing for HIV, syphilis, and Hep B. We met the incredible doctors, social workers, nutritionists, psychologists and nurses who take care of all the patients.
The vertical transmission rate of HIV is 0% when the clinic detects the disease during pregnancy (meaning HIV+ mothers are giving birth to completely healthy children thanks to this clinic). Transmission rate is 5% if the disease is discovered after birth (meaning the mothers didn’t go to the clinic for prenatal care). That’s compared to 30% if there is no prevention services.
We met a beautiful woman with her son who said that she came to the clinic when she was 5 months pregnant and found out that she was HIV+. But through PMTCT services at the clinic she is happy to say that her son (now 3 years old) is negative! She said the clinic provides her with everything she needs to stay healthy. She is so grateful!
She said “I first thank God and second, I thank the clinic. Me and my son are healthy and happy because of this clinic and these people. They are so nice to me here.”
Living proof that these services work!
Now we are on a bus heading to Quetzaltenango, 5 hours away. And tomorrow we will wake up to breakfast with adolescents who are working to empower other kids to speak out about sexual violence and advocate on their behalf.
Welcome to the debut of what I plan as a weekly post–the Thursday video. The clips I post here may be a direct comment on UNICEF’s work or may simply represent the mission we share with many.
This week’s featured video comes from Frederic Dupoux, a 25 year old Haitian photographer who has been spending much of his time in the past month in the shelter camps of Port-au-Prince. It was filmed on January 31st in the Ste Therese Football Park in Petionville.
Fred writes: “In this camp people organized it in different zones and put one person in charge of their zone to make sure that it is clean and secured. The zone I shot was called “Lakou 12 Janvye.”[Streets of January 12th]. I was amazed by how clean it was and how they had separated the camp in different sectors and assigned people in charge to make sure that it’s always clean.”
More than 200,000 people are living in temporary shelter camps, supplied with basic needs by UNICEF and other international aid organizations. An estimated 40 percent of them are under age 14.
With schools closed and adults occupied with the daily tasks of finding food, water and medical attention for their families, the young, too, are in need of some occupation. Say the boys in this video, “we may be small, but we can rap!” Watching them is like watching a spark of resilience catch fire.
As for the other star, the iconic orange jumpsuited-man – Fred says he’s “Master Guerrier L’Oiseau,” a well known karate master who lost his school in the quake. Many of his students, though, are now his neighbor in Lakou 12 Janvye.
We’re grateful to Fred for the glimpse at life in an emergency … without urgency.
It strikes me as something of an understatement, the term “care packages,” when referring to the procurement, packing, and delivery of six UPS cargo planes full of underwear, sleeping mats, soap, and toothpaste for the children in Haiti.
We’ve taken to calling them “kids’ kits,” “child protection kits,” and, also, “love kits.” But really, we’re talking about 50,000 boxes of essential disaster relief. We’re talking about providing a modicum of dignity and comfort to children who have lost everything.
Chris Tidey is a public relations officer from UNICEF Canada currently supporting the UNICEF emergency team in Haiti.
Our team set out today to speak with a group of community leaders being trained by UNICEF and its partners on how to identify and register unaccompanied children. On the drive back through the city to the UN Peacekeeping base, we stopped in front of a collapsed elementary school. We climbed atop the rubble to learn more about the school and to shoot some photographs of the scene before us. I will never forget what I saw.
Here’s some good news. Yesterday UNICEF and the Haitian Ministry of Health began immunizing the children of Port-au-Prince against measles, tetanus and diphtheria. These are the diseases that are relatively, most contagious, most highly fatal, and most prevalent in a post-disaster environment like the one in Haiti today.
Here’s some bad news. Thousands of women who are due to give birth in the quake-ravaged country this month may still be at risk of contracting tetanus during delivery. Their unborn infants are at risk also, given the shortage of sanitary birthing conditions.
Since the earthquake, maternity wards have been overwhelmed with surgical cases, leaving only the most at-risk deliveries attended. But life, of course, goes on. Medicins Sans Frontieres, just one group of medical volunteers in the country, reports an average of 12 deliveries a day, 40 percent of which are by caeserean-section. Premature births are another common, but regrettable, result of the trauma inflicted on mothers by the quake.
Thirty years ago, only one out of five children were immunized against killer diseases like measles and polio. Throughout the developing world, millions of children were dying of illnesses that had all but disappeared in the world’s wealthier countries. Since then, a near miracle has taken place. Now, four out of five children are protected by vaccines. Polio is on the verge of elimination. Measles and tetanus deaths have been reduced dramatically. This miracle did not happen by itself.
Welcome to Fieldnotes. Blogging gives us the ability to quickly report from the field, alert you to media coverage of interest, and share the success of UNICEF's lifesaving work around the globe.
We want to hear from you, so consider using the comment functionality to let us know what you think. Readers, please keep in mind that comments do not necessarily reflect official positions of UNICEF or the U.S. Fund for UNICEF. While we welcome multiple points of view here, we will review each comment prior to posting it and will not post comments that are off-topic or inappropriate for this public forum.
