Fieldnotes: Blogging on UNICEF's child survival work in the field
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Why you should keep giving to help Haiti
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| U.S. Fund for UNICEF President, Caryl Stern |
U.S. Fund for UNICEF President, Caryl Stern originally wrote this blog post for The Huffington Post on January 20, 2010. Please consider making a donation today to support UNICEF's lifesaving work for children in Haiti.
This has been, without a doubt, one of the saddest yet most rewarding weeks of my life.
News from UNICEF staff on the ground in Haiti is simply heartbreaking. In crammed hospital tents—ringed by piles of amputated limbs, bodies, and raw sewage—injured children lie shocked and alone. Throughout Port-au-Prince, people wander the streets in search of food, water, and lost family members. Chaos continues to choke this devastated nation.
But a huge influx of help has arrived and continues to arrive, thanks to the generosity of the American people. Water, medical supplies, therapeutic food, tents, blankets: tons of supplies and equipment are landing in Haiti. So are teams of experts, men and women seasoned in disaster relief who know how to hit the ground running.
Large humanitarian organizations like UNICEF sometimes get criticized for their very size. People worry that they must be bogged down by bureaucracy, or high administrative costs. But that is simply not the case. And a disaster like the Haiti earthquake starkly demonstrates how valuable size, reach, and decades of experience can be.
Mass amounts of supplies and sophisticated supply networks are needed right now, as are strong, longstanding relationships with the Haitian people and government. Organizations that possess these are able to be faster and more efficient in the current chaos. In addition, because they buy supplies in such large quantities, they are able to negotiate the absolute lowest prices.
Aid arriving for Haiti: water and sanitation a priority
Relief efforts continued four days after a devastating earthquake struck the island nation of Haiti resulting in wide-spread destruction and unimaginable loss of life.
Urgent relief supplies are making their way onto the island, however damage sustained at Port-au-Prince’s primary port, and congestion at its airport have forced UNICEF and her partners to explore alternate routes to get desperately needed aid to quake victims. One way has been diverting flights into the Dominican Republic— Haiti’s neighbor to the east—and then trucking supplies across the border in convoys.
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| © U.S. Fund for UNICEF/Alleyne/2010 |
| Specially chartered British Airways jet sits on tarmac in Santo Domingo after arriving from UNICEF's Supply Division in Copenhagen. The urgently needed relief supplies will be trucked across the border in convoys. |
One such flight recently landed in the Dominican Republic’s capital city, Santo Domingo, carrying UNICEF relief supplies destined for Port-au-Prince. The specially chartered flight arrived from UNICEF’s Supply Division in Copenhagen on a British Airways jumbo jet. The UK carrier and UNICEF partner, OXFAM helped facilitate the delivery from Denmark and British Airways flight crew were on hand to assist in the offloading of supplies.
On board were tents and reinforced tarpaulin for the provision of temporary shelter, health and hygiene kits, including obstetric and surgical supplies, as well as GPS receivers to help mitigate the challenges in telecommunication and logistical coordination. As cluster lead for water and sanitation in Haiti, one of UNICEF’s priorities is the distribution of family water kits, water purification supplies and other supplies for household-level sanitation.
Fighting cholera in Zambia
The Permanent Secretary of the District of Lusaka, Mr. Stephen Bwalya, is also present. He empowers the students to inform their teachers when there is no soap at school. The children’s response is laughter which I believe indicates enthusiasm about their new charge.
UNICEF Communication for Development Officer, James Simasiku, also speaks to the children and encourages them to take the messages about cholera prevention home to their families.
Banja plays music, dances and performs skits to reinforce the importance of hand washing. The presentations are fun and entertaining for the students—a sure way to get the important message across. The students close the event with their own performance - the national anthem sung by the school choir.
UNICEF and its partners of the “Your Life is in Your Hands” campaign are encouraged that the hundreds and hundreds of Twalumba students learned an important lesson that will help keep them safe from cholera during this and future rainy seasons.
Back to Iraq
It's pretty amazing how little Iraq is in the news these days. After all, there are still approximately 130,000 American troops in the country, (though between 35,000 and 50,000 troops are expected to pull out of Iraq by August). And there are still bombings every week that kill innocent Iraqis, including children.
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| © UNICEF/MENA06031/Giacomo Pirozzi |
| A boy fills his cupped hands with water from a UNICEF-supplied tap in the village of Kanikhan, some 65 km west of the city of Suleimaniyah. |
Generally, though, the country continues to get safer. More stable. And this is very good news. One result? After six years of managing operational response from neighboring Amman, Jordan, UNICEF Iraq is relocating senior staff to Baghdad. In the coming year, all members of the Iraq country office will do the same.
No Ordinary Meeting
As a former journalist, I've been to a lot of meetings. School boards, planning commissions, city councils, all manner of community gatherings. Some were contentious, some productive, but the majority fell into one or all of these three categories: tedious, forgettable, and decidedly unremarkable.
Which is why I'm so delighted to report that the U.S. Fund for UNICEF’s annual meeting earlier this month at New York's Desmond Tutu Center didn't really feel like a meeting at all. The extraordinary event—which featured moving testimonials from our partners and fascinating firsthand reports from UNICEF staff—packed the emotional power of a stirring ceremony or rally.
The meeting's theme—"Believe in Zero"— couldn't have been timelier. Though UNICEF has helped cut the worldwide child mortality rate by more than half over the last fifty years, 25,000 children still die every day from avoidable causes. Because of the economic crisis, deadly threats to children are actually increasing. It was galvanizing to stand in a room surrounded by so many people who believe that there is nothing more important than saving a child’s life. I'm convinced that, with more people like this, we can come closer and closer to the day when the number of children dying from preventable causes is not 25,000—it's zero.
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| © U.S. Fund for UNICEF/2009 |
| U.S. Fund for UNICEF President and C.E.O Caryl Stern at the 2009 Annual Meeting. |
A series of speakers, including U.S. Fund President and CEO Caryl M. Stern, Board Chair Anthony Pantaleoni, and Nightline co-anchor Cynthia McFadden, told the packed general session crowd about notable accomplishments, remaining challenges, and the need—now more than ever—to remain focused on our mission.
How a UNICEF well changed one girl's life
Twelve-year-old Ajimoh Yaya used to wake up at 4 A.M. each morning, walk more than a mile in the dark to the Abata River, and trudge home with buckets-full of water for her family's cooking, drinking and bathing. The river was the only water source for Ajimoh's village, Araromi Oke, in Ekiti State, Nigeria. In the dry season—when the river was low and prone to contamination—cholera, diarrhea and other waterborne illnesses raged through the community.
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| © UNICEF/NYHQ2007-0316/Christine Nesbitt |
| Ajimoh Yaya, 12, washes her younger brother before school at their home in Araromi Oke Village in the southwestern state of Ekiti, Nigera. |
The river water didn't just affect the villagers' health; the difficulty of fetching water impacted the lives of everyone, especially children. Even waking up at 4 A.M., Ajimoh's arduous chores meant she was often late for school. And because there was so little water for all the household needs, it was difficult for Ajimoh and her siblings to bathe properly. "I had rashes all over my skin," Ajimoh recalled.
Thinking of those who die in search of water
Since my friend left for Niger in late January, I haven’t exactly been worried about her safety, despite an escalation of violence by a local rebel group and reported kidnappings on the border of Niger and Mali. Mostly, I’ve been concerned about her health. As I’ve mentioned before, Niger remains one of the poorest countries in the world, and water—even dirty, bacteria-laden, brackish water—is scarce. However, I was less distressed over her going thirsty, than I was of her developing a water-borne illness of the cholera kind I have been reading and writing about lately. Therefore, when my friend traveled to the bush—the Azawak region of Niger, where her organization would survey a water borehole built last year—and I didn’t hear from her for three weeks, my fears began to creep over me. Not knowing her Skype digits, I sent a Facebook email—a smoke signal from 6,000 miles away.
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| © UNICEF/NYHQ1993-1923/Giacomo Pirozzi |
| In Niger, women (some with babies strapped to their backs) use buckets held with ropes to fetch water from a well covered with logs, near the village of Melam. |
In the weeks she was gone, a lot happened at the U.S. Fund for UNICEF—including the release of the 2009 State of the World’s Children report and the launch of some new initiatives. And now it is World Water Week, and the U.S. Fund's Tap Project is in full swing. For those of you who don’t know, the Tap Project is a campaign encourages patrons of participating restaurants to donate $1 for the tap water they normally drink for free. One child can drink clean water for 40 days on that dollar bill—a fact I did not know before I came to the U.S. Fund. This statistic, in particular, has prompted me to action on behalf of the Tap Project.
A girl struggles to survive conflict and cholera
Last December, as fighting increased in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and thousands of children continued to flee the ravages of war, Mungwiko landed at the Virunga Hospital in Goma—the capital of North Kivu Province. She was safe from such horrors as torture, rape and child conscription, but not from the conflict’s deadly diseases.
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| © UNICEF/NYHQ2008-1315/Olivier Asselin |
| Mungwiko sits on a bed at a cholera treatment centre at Virunga Hospital in Goma, capital of North Kivu Province, DRC. |
Mungwiko came to Virunga Hospital with cholera, a lethal disease usually contracted by drinking contaminated water. Mungwiko was the second of eight siblings to have contracted the illness. As she sat on her bed in the hospital’s cholera treatment center, she received oral rehydration solutions¬—provided by UNICEF¬—to combat her fierce dehydration.
Known as “the disease of the displaced,” cholera thrives on the dislocation of people and dearth of basic services that accompany long-term conflict, such as the DRC’s rebel war. During October and November, escalating hostilities in North Kivu forced some 100,000 people to leave their homes. The number of displaced people since the collapse of the Goma peace accords last August is now estimated at 250,000, mostly women and children. Some landed at one of the 60,000 camps in the Kibati area, north of Goma. Others—including thousands of children—fled across the borders to Uganda and Rwanda, where they faced recruitment or re-recruitment into armed militias.
Humanitarian Action Report gives voice to silent emergencies
Every year, UNICEF releases a Humanitarian Action Report (known as HAR around here), which shines a spotlight on emergencies you may not even know about. You see, for every headline-grabbing emergency we respond to—like last spring's Sichuan Earthquake or the cyclone in Myanmar—there are dozens of lesser-known emergencies that are imperiling children and require strong, focused action from UNICEF and our partners.
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| © UNICEF/NYHQ2007-1416/Anita Khemka |
| In Afghanistan, the maternal mortality ratio (1,800 per 100,000 live births, based on 2005 estimates) is among the highest in the world. The mother of these children died during childbirth; now the siblings look after the baby. |
These are often referred to as "silent emergencies" and they have been increasingly common of late. In fact, between 2005 and 2007, UNICEF responded annually to some 276 emergencies in 92 different countries. Over 50 percent of those emergencies were caused by disasters, 30 percent were caused by conflict, and health-related emergencies made up another 19 percent.
Newsnet: Zimbabwe's cholera crisis
Zimbabwe’s raging cholera epidemic has become one of the world’s largest outbreaks of the disease ever recorded, infecting more than 60,000 people and claiming more than 3,100 lives.
Fueled by economic and social crises, a lack of safe drinking water and sanitation, and a disintegrating health system, the epidemic has spread to all of Zimbabwe’s 10 provinces.
This major health emergency — and the response of UNICEF, the World Health Organization and other agencies — has fortunately received a strong level of media coverage from a group of news organizations that reliably cover developing world issues and also from a broad spectrum of other outlets. Agence France Presse, IRIN News, Reuters, and Voice of America have been consistently following the outbreak, and The Associated Press, BBC, CNN and NPR have carried reports. A lot of the coverage has placed the cholera outbreak in the context of Zimbabwe’s intense political and economic turmoil. PBS’s Frontline/World has run several in-depth stories on Zimbabwe’s numerous crises, including this riveting account.
Always on the side of children
We're very relieved by the news of the Gaza cease-fire. As is the case with all violent conflicts, children have been suffering the consequences of thoroughly adult problems. UNICEF's mission to help children is vital in times like these. And we're not hampered by being on one side, or on another side—we are simply and always on the side of children.
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| © UNICEF/NYHQ2009-0016/Iyad El Baba |
| Gaza, 2009: On 12 January, a girl waits on a curb with empty water containers in the southern city of Rafah. Approximately 500,000 people have no access to running water. Water and sanitation services have partially collapsed due to considerable damage to the networks, difficulties faced to make repairs and lack of fuel for power. UNICEF is working with partners to distribute supplies, including family water kits. |
As I write, UNICEF is delivering six truckloads of emergency supplies and equipment to Gaza. With water and sanitation systems in the Gaza Strip badly damaged by fighting, UNICEF is worried about outbreaks of water-related diseases, such as diarrhea and cholera. So, working with our partners, UNICEF has already distributed more than 66,000 bottles of water, and emergency water and sanitation supplies for some 30,000 people.
Fighting also upended normal food supply lines, and many children are going hungry. UNICEF is rushing to distribute 7,500 cartons of high-energy biscuits—enough to feed 80,000 children for three months. We're also sending in much-needed health kits, obstetric surgical kits, midwifery kits, resuscitation kits, first aid kits and surgical instruments.
Alyssa Milano: Help us fight cholera and dehydration
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| © UNICEF/04-1334/Noorani | |
| MYANMAR: At a rural health center in the central Magway Division, a nurse opens a pack of UNICEF-supplied oral rehydration salts to demonstrate their preparation. |
For the final 12 days of 2008, UNICEF celebrity Ambassadors and Supporters are posting daily blog entries about the impact UNICEF Inspired Gifts are having on children around the world. Alyssa Milano was appointed as a UNICEF Ambassador in 2003 and has given her wholehearted support to UNICEF in a variety of ways, including visiting with children in India and Angola to see UNICEF's work firsthand .
Did you know that, out of the 25,000 children under five who die needlessly every day, 3,500 of these preventable deaths are from dehydration caused by diarrhea? Yet out of all the things that can cause a child so young to die, diarrhea is one of the very simplest and cheapest to treat. All it takes is a small packet of something called "oral rehydration salts."
These simple salts are a glucose-based solution that quickly replaces lost fluids and revives children. This solution saves the lives of millions of children every year—and a sachet costs only a few pennies.
For example, right now Zimbabwe is suffering from the worst outbreak of cholera—a bacterial infection that causes severe diarrhea—in its modern history. Cholera is one of the most fatal illnesses known, progressing quickly from onset to death in as little as a day unless oral rehydration therapy is provided.
UNICEF has developed a 120-day emergency response plan to treat and stop the spread of this deadly disease in Zimbabwe, and oral rehydration salts (sometimes called "ORS") are one of the best interventions we have to win this fight. UNICEF is currently shipping essential medicines—including ORS—to over 1,700 clinics across the country.
Zimbabwe is just one of the more than 150 countries where UNICEF is working to provide simple solutions like ORS, and saving children’s lives. And you can help! For only $80.71 you can buy a box of 300 ORS sachets for a clinic where it's desperately needed.
I am Alyssa Milano and I believe in zero.
25,000 young children die every day from preventable causes—things like dehydration, poor sanitation and lack of safe, drinkable water. UNICEF believes that number should be zero.
NewsNet: Forced recruitment of children in DRC
It is a fate difficult to imagine for an adult, much less a child:
As fighting engulfs your community, your family is forced from their home. In the chaos that ensues, you become separated from your loved ones. Around you, people are being assaulted and killed. You run, but you don’t know where to go. You are terrified and alone. Soon, you are hungry. Soon after that, you are sick.
But for many children separated from their families during recent fighting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), this is only the beginning of the nightmare.
Reports of forced recruitment of children by armed groups are on the rise throughout the conflict-riddled North Kivu province of the DRC. UNICEF has warned that unaccompanied children are particularly at risk of exploitation. Displaced children are also made vulnerable to other forms of abuse, including rape.
Guinea-Bissau: The fight against cholera continues
One day last month, twelve-year-old Saliu came to his father, complaining of terrible stomach pains. Saliu's health quickly deteriorated, and his father rushed him to a hospital in Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau, where he was diagnosed with cholera.
Saliu is among many thousands who have fallen ill since cholera broke out in Guinea-Bissau in May. We wrote about it in early September. But, according to Reuters, the disease has still been spreading at a rate of more than 1,000 infections per month. Worst hit are the capital and regions in the west and south.
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| © UNICEF/UGDA01084/Hyun |
| UGANDA: A child affected by cholera receives an intravenous drip as his father sits by his bed inside the Cholera Treatment Center of Kitgum Government Hospital in northern Uganda. The center was established with UNICEF support to respond to a cholera outbreak in 2006. |
Cholera is a highly contagious water-borne disease that causes acute diarrhea and vomiting. And in severe cases, it can lead to death from dehydration within hours. Cholera spreads where sewage is left untreated and people don't have access to clean drinking water. The prevalence of the disease is considered a key indicator of social development.
NewsNet: Combating cholera
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| In 1912, a French newspaper personified cholera as a shrouded, scythe-wielding skeleton. |
Cholera probably killed U.S. President James K. Polk in 1849, shortly after he left office. This fierce water-borne disease was a major public health menace during the 19th and early 20th centuries, causing widespread death—and mass panic—around the world, including in cities like London, New York and Paris.
Today, due in large part to the broad accessibility of clean water and adequate sanitation, cholera is rarely a threat in the industrialized world.
But the disease still stalks developing countries where safe water and proper sanitation remain luxuries for many people. Over the last few months, the tiny nation of Guinea-Bissau in western Africa has been battling a cholera epidemic that has rapidly spread across the country.
UNICEF quickly stepped in to help Guinea-Bissau fight the disease, mobilizing funds and leading the initiative to disinfect the country’s water systems in affected areas. In addition to managing contaminated human waste and distributing critical hygiene and sanitation products, such as soap and bleach, UNICEF is also backing a public information campaign that emphasizes disease prevention and proper hygiene.
Myanmar and the dangerous dengue
Something I've heard again and again from UNICEF staff who have spent a lot of time in the field: the truly tough work of emergency response often begins weeks and even months after the immediate emergency is over. This is partly because media attention has dwindled and the donations aren't coming in the way they once were. (Less money means stretched resources.) It's also the case because diseases such as cholera, malaria and dengue fever can get a nasty foothold amongst people who, in the wake of a disaster, find themselves without homes, proper sanitation, adequate nutrition or clean, safe drinking water.
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| © UNICEF/HQ08-0323/Adam Dean |
| MYANMAR: A small boy washes his hair with soap in the cyclone-affected township of Kunyangon in the southern Yangon Division. |
These days, UNICEF is working harder than ever in Myanmar. Recently, we've been worried about possible outbreaks of dengue fever there. When Cyclone Nargis blasted across the Irrawaddy Delta in early May, it left behind the sort of destruction that makes an attractive breeding ground for the dengue-carrying Aedes mosquito. Stagnant pools of water that collect in debris—scattered pots and pans, tires, bottles, ruined boats, plastic tarps—are like five-star hotels for these mosquitoes.
Dengue fever is a miserable disease. My cousin was unlucky enough to get it when he lived in Thailand. It leaves you with a fever, severe headache, muscle and joint pain, a rash and, in some cases (my cousin's being one of them) hair loss. The extreme version of the disease, dengue hemorrhagic fever, can be fatal. Dengue hits children and the elderly especially hard. There is no vaccine. And bed nets don't help because, unlike malaria mosquitoes which feed at night, dengue mosquitoes prefer to take their meals in the daytime.
UNICEF and emergencies
The Myanmar cyclone and the China earthquake. It's very unusual for two natural disasters of such massive scale to occur within such a small window of time. Luckily, UNICEF is used to dealing with more than one emergency at once, while also ensuring that none of the ongoing programs in more than 150 countries where we work in suffer. I guess you could say we're very good at multi-tasking on a global level.
UNICEF in Myanmar — Before, during and after
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| © UNICEF Myanmar/2008/Win Naing | |
| UNICEF staff travel to a remote village in western Ayeyarwady Division. |
When the cyclone struck Myanmar last week, many of the worst-hit areas were unreachable by road. Plus, there was the problem of getting permission to enter the country. A lot of relief organizations were turned away or had to wait for government-issued visas, a long process when time is critical. But not UNICEF. UNICEF didn’t need special entry because it’s been in Myanmar since 1950. So when it came time to respond, UNICEF was ready with 130 staff members and pre-stocked emergency supplies inside the country.
Myanmar: What we're doing and how you can help
We've had an incredibly supportive response to the work we are doing in Myanmar right now. As mentioned in this situation report, UNICEF has been a presence in the country since 1950, and UNICEF's staff on the ground there has been working exhausting days and long nights to get help to the children and families affected by the cyclone.
Some of you have left comments on the blog asking how you can go to Myanmar with UNICEF and volunteer there in person. First off, thank you for feeling so passionately about both wanting to help, and wanting to be part of UNICEF's efforts there. It says a lot. Unfortunately, for a whole host of reasons, we're not able to place volunteers overseas as part of our programs. We do work with volunteers who come to us through the United Nations Volunteer Program. This program is very much like the Peace Corps and it requires specialized skills and a long-term time commitment. If it sounds like something you'd like to pursue, I encourage you to check out the UN Volunteer Program website.
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| © UNICEF/ HQ08-0368 |
| A woman holds her child amid the debris of their village in Kawhmu Township of Myanmar. The child's face is smudged with thanaka—a paste made of ground wood which women and children in Myanmar have used for over 2000 years to cool down, decorate their skin, and protect themselves from sunburn. |
UNICEF's emergency work in Myanmar continues
As you know, UNICEF began responding within a day of the disaster, drawing on pre-positioned emergency medical supplies. Here's a quick recap of what's been delivered to date:
- 6,000 ORS, 1,500 water guards, 10 essential drug kits (to cover 5,000 people per kit), 20 first aid kits, 270 tarpaulins, 1 bleaching drum and 300 family kits to Laputta, Irrawady division
- 5,000 ORS, 5,000 water guards, 10 drug kits, 20 first aid kits, 100 tarpaulins and 1 bleaching drum to Mawlemyine Kyun, Irrawaddy division.
[Pix] Clean water and nutrition for the children of Darfur
The situation of children and women in the Darfur region of Sudan remains tenuous. The civil conflict that began in 2003 has killed up to 450,000 people and driven 1.8 million people from their homes. UNICEF is currently providing humanitarian...
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