Momentos, Traveling with UNICEF by Tony Bloomberg

I was hired by UNICEF in 1977 on a two-year contract to establish the Financial Planning and Monitoring System. Little did I know that I would work in UNICEF for 31 years nor that my UNICEF life would see me travel the world. I have momentos of those travels that I cherish.

In 1979 I was selected to participate in the Inter-regional staff seminar organized by Herman Stein, adviser extraordinaire to the Executive Director. The subject was antenatal and perinatal child health, which gave me a great introduction to the premier sector of UNICEF activities. We spent a week in Bali that at the time had few tourists. During a break I walked along the beach and encountered the Sheraton Hotel and its souvenir shop where I saw a beautiful wooden sculpture of a Balinese Dancer. It was unlike any other carving I saw in Bali and I bought it. It sits on my dining table to this day.

Balinese Dancer

My two-year contract was extended for a further two years and then I was promoted to be the Chief of Finance. In that capacity I was asked to participate in the David Haxton led Task Force on Information Management. As part of that exercise we visited a few field offices to interview senior staff and that’s how I came to visit Islamabad in the early 1980s. Fellow team member Shob Jhie was interested to buy a carpet and I accompanied him to the Islamabad market. We passed a stall that displayed a silver bowl with Hebrew lettering that read ‘Eight days you will circumcise male children’. It showed beautiful workmanship. I asked the stall owner what the bowl was for and where it came from – he said it came from Persia and was for nuts. I surmised that the bowl was used by the ritual circumciser – or Mohel - to temporarily store the cut foreskin before secretly burying it and that it was likely sold by a member of the Iranian Jewish Community fleeing Iran following the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Naturally I bought it and it decorates my sideboard.

Silver Bowl (opened by lifting the knob at front)

Following my participation in the Information Management Task Force, one evening whilst walking to Grand Central Station on my way home, I waited at a traffic light. Deputy ExDir Karl-Eric Knuttson came up beside me and asked whether I would agree to be the first Director of the Information Resources Management Office – a forerunner of the IT Division. I said Yes and we crossed the street and went our separate ways. Very shortly afterwards Margaret Catley-Carlson became the new Deputy Exdir and she distributed an end of year budget surplus to field offices to purchase PC computers. Field offices had the PCs but no software to run on them and on their own initiative started to develop disparate applications with no standard means to connect financial and other data with HQ systems. I rushed through the development of a standard field office system GFSS (Global Field Support System) that initially had many bugs. There was some initial field office resistance to accepting GFSS especially in West Africa. At a Christmas party in Unicef HQ, visiting Mali Rep Leo de Vos and I chatted over more than a few drinks. We agreed by a solemn shake of hands that I would come to Mali to introduce GFSS and he would then take me to Timbuktu. Leo and I flew into Timbuktu with the Timbuktu suboffice data loaded on my laptop. I demonstrated the utility of GFSS for the suboffice to its Italian Chief who liked to ride his white horse around town at sunset. At his house I saw some small figurines that caught my fancy and was embarrassed that he immediately gave me three despite my protestations. Somewhere I lost one but I treasure the remaining two that I keep on a mantle shelf. The success of the GFSS installation in Mali led the Regional Office to accept and promote its introduction into other offices of the region.

Small Figurines

In my capacity as Director of Information Management I made periodic visits to field offices to check up on how they were doing. On a visit to Phnom Penh I made a side trip to Angkor Watt that had recently been liberated from the Khmer Rouge. In fact, I was the only person at the site and was accompanied by an AK-47 toting Vietnamese soldier to help navigate around mines; and there were still Khmer Rouge fighters lurking in the nearby forest. On return to Phnom Penh my friend Katya Fisch, who was the Operations Officer in Phnom Penh at the time, gave me some rubbings from Angkor Watt that were taken by an enterprising local Cambodian and sold to foreigners. These rubbings now hang on my bedroom wall.

 Angkor Watt Rubbings

Urban Jonsson entered UNICEF as Representative of UNICEF Tanzania. He was very interested in using computer applications for practical support of programme and general office management. He invited me to visit Dar-Es-Salaam to learn what he was doing and how he was doing it; it was a busy few days. After one morning session a national officer named Sarah, who was the wife of the Tanzanian Minister of Health, suggested I take a break and she drove me north to a village renowned for their wood carvings. She drove the 4-wheel drive down and then up large craters in the road before we arrived at the village just after a downpour. We inspected the carved items on display and there was one, the head of a Masai warrior, that I found exceptional. Sarah agreed that this was truly a rare find and I bought it. It now rests on a mantle shelf above the fireplace in my living room.

 Masai Warrior

When Carol Bellamy took over as ExDir, she wanted to replace me. I said fine and I want to become a field office Representative. So it was that I arrived in Sierra Leone as Representative a few months before the coup d’etat of May 1997. As part of my orientation, on weekends, I would travel outside the capital Freetown to get to know the area. One trip was south around the Peninsular where I stopped at the fishing village of Tombo, which bustled with activity with fishermen and market women in colourful clothing. My Deputy Nasim Ahmed and I would often sally forth on weekends to the beach location River #2. On one visit to River #2, I was approached by someone offering to sell a few relatively small wooden carvings that appealed to me and so I bought them. One depicted a Chief’s head and the other a Sande woman’s head with a bird atop; the Sande were women who initiated young girls including to perform female circumcision. I was told that woman in this carving served as an oracle with the voice of that magical bird. They sit between books in my library.

Sierra Leone Carvings

After the coup d’etat, UN internationals were evacuated to Conakry Guinea and from there UNICEF was the only UN agency to mount a cross-border operation into Sierra Leone for the 9 months of junta rule; this despite an international regime of sanctions and embargo on the junta. Its immense success in saving childrens’ lives was largely due to the magnificent efforts of the national staff. One day walking in Conakry I saw a man selling paintings and one in particular looked familiar. Yes, said the man, it is a painting of the Tombo fishing village. I am the artist and I am in exile here in Conakry. The painting was exactly how I remembered Tombo and I bought it without hesitation. It now hangs on my kitchen wall.

Tombo painting

My next duty station was Angola. When I accepted the position there was a peace process but soon afterwards civil war resumed. I joked that every country I came to has the misfortune to fall into civil war shortly after my arrival. Since my wife Pooa is Israeli we became friendly with the charismatic Israeli Ambassador Tamar Golan. UNICEF had a partnership with Israel for Mine Awareness Education, with Israeli volunteers. Tamar gave me an interesting looking carving from the Lunda Region of north-eastern Angola. When packing up to transfer to my next duty station, as I was supposed to, I asked for official clearance of the artifacts I had purchased or was given in Angola – including the carving Tamar had given me. The authorities said the statue had gone missing from the National Museum and they retained it. I reported this to Tamar and she said the museum staff sold their national treasures and the retained carving would surely be resold immediately to the next willing buyer. Without me asking, she gave me a slave shackle – an offer I felt I could not refuse; Angola was perhaps the largest source of slaves to the Americas – mainly Brazil. The shackle rests on a mantle of my downstairs library.

Slave Shackle

Pooa and I flew out of Angola to Vietnam for my next posting. Early in our stay we visited a gallery selling silk embroidered pictures. One caught my attention – a view across Hanoi’s Hoàn Kiếm Lake. I liked to take walks in Hanoi during my lunch break and recognized exactly the vantage point of this picture. The workmanship was also immaculate and I bought it. It now hangs on our living room wall.

Hoàn Kiếm Lake

Twice a year, Representatives gather for Regional meetings. One time this was held in Myanmar and attached to the meeting was a week’s visit to programme sites in the country. Pooa accompanied me and during this extra week we passed through Mandalay. At a workshop producing tapestries we encountered two or three women working on one piece that was about half finished. They explained that this was ‘Buddha’s Foot’ and could be finished in two days. We were due to fly out of Mandalay in two days but I really wanted this work and so paid half the price in advance and asked that they bring the finished work to the airport before we departed and I would then pay the final installment. This they did and it hangs on the wall of our dining room.

Buddha's Foot

Another Regional Reps meeting was in Beijing and Pooa also accompanied me there. After the meeting we took a trip to Xian to see the Terracotta Warriors. In walking through Xian town, we passed a building with some paintings for sale outside. On entering, we found it was an art school and more paintings and drawings were for sale. Two pictures attracted my attention since they were well executed and of child-related interest and I bought them. They now hang on the wall of the bedroom our grandchildren use when they sleep-over.

Xian Pictures

Our eldest son Ramon married Marie, a French girl, whilst we were in Vietnam and her parents paid us a visit. We took a walk together along the levee next to the Red River and visited a nearby shop selling antiques. There I saw two dusty and dirty looking carved wooden dolls. Now, such dolls can be seen in many souvenir shops in Vietnam but, looking beyond their neglected external appearance, I detected a superior quality – so I bought them. My daughter-in-law’s father Arnaud helped me carefully remove grime from the surface – a real amateur restoration effort – bringing out the gold leaf and other tones beneath the surface. These dolls now look at me from the two corners of my office desk.

Vietnamese Dolls

This is how they are actually positioned in my office, which is on a mezzanine overlooking the living room.

Dolls in actual office setting

One day sitting in my Hanoi office, I received a telephone call from Deputy ExDir Karin Sham Poo. ‘Tony, Carol has asked me to ask you to be our next Rep in Congo Kinshasa’. I fancied that I was now in tune with Confucian culture and thought of Beijing as my next assignment. ‘No Tony, you aren’t going to Beijing but we need you in Kinshasa’. So, I switched mentally into positive mode and accepted to return to the front lines of Africa.

DRC Kinshasa turned out to be a challenging but also rewarding last duty station before retirement. On arrival I found an excellent Deputy in Herve Peries. He was an amateur expert in African art. When he transferred to be Rep in Burkina Faso he gave me a few Congolese carvings. One rests atop a bookshelf in my library.

Congolese Face

Somewhere in DRC, I picked up a pair of malachite animal carvings; one of a hippo and the other of a rhino. I put them on the mantle of my library next to the fireplace. Just recently I noticed that the rhino was mysteriously missing. Malachite is a relatively fragile stone and Pooa and I hypothesized that our cleaners may have accidently dislodged it onto the marble fireside base under the mantlepiece and shattered it. We didn’t think to raise this with them and our hippo now stands alone.

Malachite Hippo