XUNICEF News and Views

  In April 2021 I wrote a mini-series of four articles on UNICEF's early days in China. Rereading them recently, it seemed to me that I was missing a piece on Leo Eloesser who played such an important role in China but in UNICEF's thinking on community medicine and primary health care. He only worked with UNICEF for a very short time—5 years—but they were momentous years for UNICEF and for him. In this article I write only about his history before and after UNICEF. The story of his brief period with UNICEF will come in the next article, The Shijiazhuang Strategy . One of the most interesting, colorful, and important characters in UNICEF's early history was Dr. Leo Eloesser. In what remains the best and most comprehensive book on UNICEF's history, The Children and the Nations , Maggie Black describes how the newly arrived first representative of UNICEF in China, Dr. Marcel Junod, recruited Eloesser from UNRRA to serve as his emissary to parts of China under Comm...

This article tells the story of the Shijiazhuang Agreement of August 1948 and UNICEF's first attempt to switch from distribution of relief supplies to capacity building through training of community health workers and village midwives. The Idea Had History The idea was certainly not new. For more than twenty years, Chinese and foreign public-health pioneers had been experimenting with ways of bringing basic health services to China's enormous rural population. Eloesser had also learned from war. Like Marcel Junod, he had witnessed the carnage of the Spanish Civil War; unlike Junod, Eloesser and Norman Bethune had worked as surgeons on the Republican side. Both had learned the value of simple techniques and the rapid training of nurses, orderlies and others when doctors and conventional medical facilities were scarce. Early in his China assignment, Eloesser went north on a WHO teaching assignment and spent five months at a small village hospital named for Bethune. With virtua...

With the UNGA high-level week about to kick off, and in the spirit of the International Day of Peace, 21 September,

Welding of Supporting Cylinder Steel Columns In 1999, while serving as Head of the Water and Sanitation Programme at UNICEF Iraq, we were approached by the Baghdad Sewage Authority with an urgent plea.

With the UN General Assembly starting this week here is an analysis of how the UN is being dismembered and its organs diminished by the very members which started it.

I have just finished reading Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. Hamid wrote it during the 2015 European refugee crisis and published it in 2017. It was clearly influenced by the Syrian crisis and that wave of migration. But Hamid leaves the country and time unnamed. The novel is about mass migration in general, a warning of the next, inevitable, and much larger wave, and that migration is a feature of today's world. Hamid presents borders as increasingly futile and large-scale migration as a natural process that is meaningless to resist. He describes resistance in the receiving countries as based on irrational fear and tribalism. Hamid ignores all practical limitations like housing, schools, healthcare, and jobs.  It is well written and worth reading, but it will not enlighten you on migration policy. It stresses empathy while leaving solutions aside. 

Some time agao, a  video in the XUNICEF blog reminded me of my motorcycle trips before and after my retirement.

Recent Reader Comments Continously updated

In A Little History #8  I described the career of Dr. Marcel Junod before he joined UNICEF.  This article continues his story after arriving as UNICEF's first representative in China. Junod: February 1948 In February 1948, UNICEF's first Representative in China, Dr. Marcel Junod, arrived in the Nationalist capital, Nanjing. His wife and young son followed, arriving a couple of months later by ship via Manila. Junod with his young son, Benoit Junod took over from Mary Pavlevsky, UNRRA's social welfare coordinator who had filled in as interim head of office. Not much is recorded about Pavlevsky except that she was recruited by UNRRA from the American Red Cross, where she served as a psychiatric social worker in North African military hospitals. She had traveled extensively in China and understood its social welfare landscape, though she likely carried over UNRRA’s focus on the bulk distribution of donated goods. To her credit, with no formal UNICEF back...

The potential adverse effects of AI have been in the news for a few weeks.

Having been recruited by USAID to work in Albania during the Kosovo Crisis put me in an interesting position. 

People have demonstrated unjustified trust in generative AI. Generative AI is inherently probabilistic—meaning it strings together likely patterns rather than verifying factual truths

The escalating global water crisis presents an immediate and severe threat to child survival, driven by the dangerous convergence of climate change, environmental degradation, and neglected infrastructure.