Drivers of UNICEF - Keeping Us Safe and Shaping the CPD? By Rob Carr

Thinking about Tim's Article on becoming a driver for his teenage kids after retirement and his stories about UNICEF drivers - I thought of a driver I was very fond of - his name was Mohammed. 

Mohammed was a driver for our field office near the sprawling refugee camps in Tanzania in the late 1990s and early 2000s.   We would visit the camps and also the villages near the camps where the conditions of local "host community" children were often far worse than refugee children.  Mohammed spoke the dialect of the refugees and the host community villages.  He had a very soft voice  - it was very different than the iron grip and nerves of steel he had at the wheel of our Landcruiser.  

Once he was with me at a vaccination campaign in a host community - we met a very thin mother (who looked to be in her teens or early 20s) - she was saddled with very thin twins.   After they were vaccinated we had a chat with her - via Mohammed.  His face turned very sad and he nearly cried as he translated for me the story of this woman.  With a side glance and tilt of his head  - he calmy motioned to me that we should offer her a ride home as her house was quite far from the clinic.  Against all UNDSS rules of "no passengers" - we gave her and the wide eyed twins a ride home.  We got to her mud hut - it was tidy but devoid of any stored food and miles from water--miles from anywhere.  I still don't know how she survived - and there were 3 more kids about one year  apart that looked to all be under age five or six  PLUS the twins.  

My heart sank as we churned up the red dust on the way to her home - we stopped and bought the woman and her kids a bag of maize and some soap - a very token thing.  I usually did not do that  - as every time we turned a corner there was a family like that or worse.  Even if we had a lorry of maize and soap--it was a drop of water in an ocean of need.   Such is UNICEF?  The hungry mouths would gobble that maize in days, the soap would wash some clothes or be sold for food -  and then what?  

But Mohammed and I could not shake off her story like so much dust in our hair - we talked about her in the car for the coming days -  and in fact for the next couple of years I was there we never forget about that visit.  When we designed a new CPD about a year after this visit, Mohammed was invited (you know a giant office meeting at a hotel to "design"  or "vision" the CPD priorities - he came as staff association Rep from the field office) and he re-told the story of that woman - a teenage mom with 2 stunted twins and 3 other kids below 5 or 6 years old.  She was steps away from a refugee camp but had no (or very difficult) access to food, piped water, SGBV support, school or medical care that was provided in the camps - she fended for herself in her dusty village.  She and her equally thin husband scratched the hard soil to grow some maize and beans, carried water for miles, and their kids were likely doomed to be stunted for life.  What could UNICEF do?

With the soft voice of Mohammed - we tried to make her the central target of our new CPD - everything we aimed to do should touch her life and that of her twins.  I recall we had a picture of her - I don't have it now (this one here is from UNICEF Zambia--the women we met rarely smiled, was half this size and the twins were a shadow of these 2) - but she was placed in the center - tiny twins on her hips - and we made bubbles all around her with key words of our interventions - we tried to show how each one touched her life and how inter-connected our siloed programmes should be. Human rights approach to programming made very simple and stark.   I am quite sure we never succeeded to change her life beyond that bag of maize and piece of soap - but through the lens of  Mohammed - we had a brief moment of clarity.  It may have been the only moment of clarity in my 30+ years of UNICEF.

And we did not even have to hire consultant to show us how to design our CPD?  All we needed was the soft voice of Mohammed and the thin face of a mother and her twins. He was a GS3 driver.  His post was abolished in our CPMP following the new CPD -  as we closed that field office as funding dwindled. He went on to UNDP  and later was made chief of transport.  At that moment (and most of the time I knew him) he was smarter and more clear thinking than any staff or expert we had in our arsenal.  

Do you have a favorite reflection of a driver - fun or serious?  PLEASE SHARE a story.

Photo credit here and a nice article on twins in Zambia here.