Saida arrived at the Choucha camp on the Tunisian-Libyan border on March 8. She may be only 6, but she is used to life as a refugee.

UNICEF responds to more than 200 emergencies every year. But it is rare for so many of them to be prominently featured on the front page news at once.

This is a photo of Ahmed. He’s a two-year old Egyptian boy who was among those lucky enough to get a ride, along with his family, across the border into Tunisia…and one step closer to home.

This week’s Monday photo comes from the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR.

It’s a photo from Al-Tanf refugee camp, which has closed – we hope – for good. Established in 2006, when hundreds of Palestinian refugees fleeing persecution in Iraq were prevented from crossing into Syria, the border camp was never meant to be a home. But that’s what the strip of desert sandwiched between a busy highway and a wall became.

This month, the United Nations refugee agency transferred the last 60 people from Al-Tanf, ending their long exile in a bleak no-man’s land.

© UNHCR/B.Diab

A young boy helps pack up the last of the belongings of the Al-Tanf refugees.

UNICEF supported the children of Al-Tanf camp with recreational materials and counselling. The residents of Al-Tanf join about 2,000 other Palestinian refugees in camps inside Syria and in Iraq, according to UNHCR.

After spending a year in Iraq, I left in the spring of 2004 when the level of violence

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

In Egypt where UNICEF was 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.

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