In Grand Turk Island, the capital island of the Turks and Caicos, 14-year-old Danessa Estime writes rap lyrics in her notebook about the night Hurricane Irma battered the island: “Wake up, wake up! But 5:32? Why the hell am I waking up at 5:32? Ma, what’s going on? What do you want me to do? Did something happen to be up at 5:32? She… Read more →←
Topic: Children in emergencies
When I lost all my family at the age of 15 I decided to leave the Gambia. Since I didn’t have any money to buy a bus ticket I left by foot, walking for hours towards the border of Senegal. I had to cross five countries during my travels: Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Libya. The entire journey took me seven months. All in all,… Read more →←
I will always remember that night in December 2013. My family had had dinner and spent some time discussing the events of the day before heading to bed. About 30 minutes later, I heard gunshots. I thought they were the usual gunshots that I often heard in Juba but these continued throughout the night. At some point, my father gathered us… Read more →←
End of August 2017. I am visiting the primary school of Malandji in Kananga, capital of Kasai Central Province, Democratic Republic of Congo. There is a lot of activity. The director receives one mother after another, in his small office for the enrollment in the new school year. Nothing special, you would think. In thousands of schools… Read more →←
Impressive. That’s the word I’d use to best describe what’s happening at the shelter for Barbudan evacuees I visited. At the National Technical Training Centre in Antigua, I saw that, despite the trauma of Hurricane Irma, people were trying to get back to some kind of normal routine. There were a couple of seven year olds happily… Read more →←
There is enormous devastation here. Most of the telephone poles are down, roads are blocked, lots of trees uprooted. Many houses have lost roofs, including mine. Part of my house has a galvanised roof and most of these have blown off. Some buildings have totally collapsed. Across the whole island, electricity is off completely. We have… Read more →←
I am waking up to battering rain. Irma is coming closer. Packing winds of 185mph, Irma is the most powerful Atlantic hurricane on record. Exceeding current storm category measures (above 5), Irma is far stronger than Hurricane Matthew, a category 4 hurricane that brought devastation to Haiti just one year ago. Irma is barreling across… Read more →←
The sun never sets on UNICEF – and when children are in danger, the global community leaps into action to protect them. Saturday night Panama. Sunday morning Bangkok. Middle of the night in France. What do they have to do with a hurricane forming in the Caribbean? It means using every available UNICEF channel to get life-saving ‘be… Read more →←
Drought has displaced 766,000 people in Somalia since November, and the country is also facing one of its worst outbreaks of cholera. UNICEF and its partners have provided more than 1.66 million people with temporary access to safe water, up from some 300,000 in January. More than 390,000 children and women have lifesaving health… Read more →←
If Ebola was an emergency based around a tiny virus that often killed before it was discovered, the deep brown gash on a Freetown hillside is a sign of a disaster of a very different nature. Like Rio de Janiero on the other side of the Atlantic, Sierra Leone’s capital is built on spectacular coastal hills, and is overshadowed by a… Read more →←
