Sink or Swim: UNICEF in emergencies: Some recollections
Some people came to UNICEF with extensive training and experience in emergencies. I had health program experience but not in emergencies; I learned about emergencies by what felt like being thrown into the water to ‘sink or swim’. The 1994 Rwanda genocide happened soon after I joined the Nutrition Section in headquarters. I had met Mr. Grant in Burundi before I worked for UNICEF, and he remembered that I had some modest knowledge of the distinct but closely related languages of Rwanda and Burundi. I had done my doctoral work in Rwanda before joining UNICEF and also had done some consulting for UNICEF-Rwanda. So I was encouraged to be part of the substantial number of UNICEF staff who worked in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide.
Once in Rwanda, I was lucky to work with the great Cyridion Ahimana, a local staff member who would go on to have a distinguished career as an international UN health and nutrition expert. Nigel Fisher sent us around Rwanda to check on the places where we thought that children who had lost their parents were gathered. As usual in UNICEF, we were conditioned to be most concerned for the under-fives who tend to be the most vulnerable. In this case, as we quickly learned, it was the older children, many of whom had witnessed the brutal slaying of their parents, who were most traumatized as they understood better than the younger kids what they had been through. We met many children who had hidden in trees, in the ceilings of houses or in other precarious situations to save themselves. Their trauma was obvious.
The places where children were temporarily gathered were mostly church properties, and the caregivers were mostly volunteers. The caregivers themselves were traumatized. We had no psychological training, but Cyridion was great with the kids, drawing out stories, comforting them. The children clung to him when we tried to leave. There was a plain need for sympathetic people like Cyridion and others with professional psychotherapeutic knowledge to work with these children.
In those days, psychological assistance for unaccompanied children was not a standard part of emergency packages in the UN. Cyridion and I reported back to UNICEF-Kigali office. Others can tell the story of the next steps better than I can, but psychologists with emergency experience were sent first from Italy, and many children were reached with the programs they initiated. As has been widely reported, UNICEF’s best move under these circumstances was to get schools up and running as soon as possible, giving children some structure in their lives and the chance to be with other children in a safe environment.
I was later sent on short-term emergency missions to Sierra Leone, Haiti, Somalia, and DPR Korea. The last was special. I was part of the first major emergency team in DPRK in 1995, along with Rodney Hatfield from the UNICEF Bangkok Regional Office, who had been to the country a number of times. There were also natural disaster experts, who were sent from OCHA, Geneva. Severe flooding had forced the DPRK government to solicit international help and admit a UN emergency team for the first time.
The government wanted the floods to be understood as a natural disaster, and that was the expertise of most of our team, but it was evident that this was a complex emergency. There were many sad and sometimes surreal moments in our ten-day stay. The government officials showed us some films of the floods and thought we would move directly to arranging food assistance, the aid most sought by them. When our team said that we needed to see the affected areas, we were transported around the country by car, helicopter and boat. IT became clear that entire villages had been destroyed. The usual procedure would be to do a rapid nutrition survey to inform any food aid program, but the government rejected our proposal. In a number of frustrating discussions, the health authorities argued that young children in DPRK could not be measured against international growth standards because they grow in a special way. In subsequent visits by other teams and with the intervention of WFP, aid was finally worked out.
I am grateful for the emergency experiences that I had in UNICEF – far fewer than those of the real emergency experts, but enough to teach me some of the basics. From HQ and later from the Nairobi Regional Office, I was glad to participate in the discussions around developing the SPHERE standards for rights-based approaches in emergencies. In the 2008-09 academic year, when I was hired as a professor at Columbia University, my department did not have expertise for a course on nutrition in complex emergencies. While I was hired to teach health and human rights, I filled in on nutrition in emergencies and taught the course for several years. I am grateful to David Clark, recently retired from his brilliant work in UNICEF on the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes, for helping our students over the years to know the importance of protecting breastfeeding in emergencies and at other times. It has been great to see some of the students in Columbia’s excellent Forced Migration program go on to positions where they help shape more and more rights-based approaches to emergency work.
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