GOSH ! Cant believe it is six years: Fouad Kronfol

GOSH ! Cant believe it is six years,
Of blood, sweat and, yes, tears,
Going backwards in arrears
Our senior moments each of us clears.
 
Oh ! those volunteer editors, my Dears,
Their advices are ringing in  my ears
On various "techie" issues I had my fears.
But our enterprising group changed the gears.
 
And now everyone of us hears,
As the weekly deadline nears,
We are working mainly for our peers
So accept with humor their jeers
But know that many of them mean CHEERS !

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What started out as my personal compilation of publications by XUNICEF members or related to UNICEF, UN and Agencies, in order to develop a bibliography, spawned many other endeavours as we joined forces in a small but active Editors Group to start a regular newsletter for circulation to former colleagues. One of our hopes,which did  not finally bear fruit, was to push UNICEF HQ to resurrect the UNICEF History Project of the 1980's. Nevertheless we gamely continued our efforts at connecting and expanding a network of former staff into a semblance of an association with the weekly publication of the News and Views bulletin. This had its many transformations over time as we worked our way to making it an interactive blog for the exchange of ideas, comments, articles, etc. In the process we branched into the discovery of a slew of artists, photographers, poets. music afficionados,etc. whose works were shared with the burgeoning XUNICEF membership, now hitting over 1,000 in over a hundred countries. 

This publication has in fact become, together with the Reunions, one of the main avenues of communication with former...and current... staff members. Our banner year was 2021 where we celebrated with UNICEF its 75th Anniversary. On that special year our efforts went into publishing three quarterly issues, each of which covered 25 years of selected activities and events with a broad spectrum of articles, historical data, as well as other items of general or specific nature. By clicking here you can revisit each of these issues, some of which were quite voluminous.

Along the way I personally started a column devoted to philatelic materials issued by countries for UNICEF, the UN, the Agencies, or specific subjects related to children, It is amazing how this series has now passed 107 articles, and still going strong, although I must admit stamps and covers are not of particular interest to most of our members. It is interesting that also quite out of the blue I developed an aptitude for composing rhymes or Ditties as we called them, and this has encouraged my colleagues Sree and Tom to complement mine with compositions of theirs. We now have a rich lode of these stored in our XUNICEF blog library.

It has been an interesting half a dozen years of participation in this endeavour and I must emphasize also much fun. Most importantly it has contributed to cementing close ties with my co-editors, some of whom I had not known in my working days. 

ONWARDS FOR THE NEXT SIX YEARS.!!