XUNICEF News and Views

Our friend and colleague Leo Goulet has just sent in a detailed sitrep on the actual situation in one of the affected areas of Nepal:

Dear Fouad & colleagues, The apocalyptic deluge in Nepal has many of us stunned, dazed and incredibly dismayed.

One good sunrise deserves another. Fouad Thanks Fouad! Here's one from Cambodia: Sunrise on the Mekong at Phnom Penh. Leo    

  Leo Goulet and I had lunch this week after his return from a two month visit to Asia... it shows the two of us at our island restaurant called Ben &Florentine.

Le Vieux Port de Montréal, le 11 août à 2000 hrs. Salut Leo Salut! Leo 😎

Photo shared by Fouad Kronfol

1. The meaning of opaque is unclear. 2. I wasn't going to get a brain transplant but then I changed my mind. 3. Have you ever tried to eat a clock? It's very time consuming. 4. A man tried to assault me with milk, cream, and butter. How dairy! 5. I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. I can't put it down. 6. If there was someone selling marijuana in our neighborhood, weed know about it. 7. It's a lengthy article about ancient Japanese sword fighters but I can Samurais it for you. 8. It's not that the man couldn't juggle, he just didn't have the balls to do it. 9. So what if I don't know the meaning of the word 'apocalypse'? It's not the end of the world. 10. Police were called to the daycare center. A 3-year-old was resisting a rest. 11. The other day I held the door open for a clown. I thought it was a nice jester. 12. Need an ark to save two of every animal? I Noah guy. 13. Alternative facts are aversion of the t...

  Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year! Leo   😎

Leo has a fantastic collection of photographs taken in all the places he worked. This week he has shared with us part of his Vietnam collection spanning October 1980 till March 1985 when he joined Fouad Kronfol's team in Hanoi as the WATSAN Project Officer.  In all his postings Leo headed a rural water and sanitation team. Here a short list of his postings and consultancies: Nepal: 1973-1980 (Bhutan included up until 1977, at which time responsibility for the Bhutan Country Programme was transferred to New Delhi from Kathmandu); Vietnam: 1980-1985; Benin: 1985-1987; Niger, a three-month RWSS consultancy; South Sudan: 2005-2006. Leo also spent several months in Vietnam in 1998, leading teams that were evaluating UNICEF-assisted RWSS programmes. By looking at this list, we can expect other interesting photo essays.  Women and bikes in Thanh Hoa Province on 11 October 1980. A group of us were taken to see the damage caused by the typhoon that hit the area a few days earlier....

UNICEF began its large-scale assistance to Rural Water Supply and Sanitation (RWSS) programmes in Nepal and Bhutan in 1973, and Vietnam in 1980. I worked with the UNICEF-assisted RWSS Programme in Nepal from 1973 to 1980, Bhutan from 1973 to 1977, and Vietnam from 1980 to 1985. Programmes in each of the three countries evolved in directions that were appropriate to the conditions that prevailed in each. While the conditions were similar in Nepal and Bhutan, the situation in Vietnam was quite different in many ways. The main challenge for RWSS in Nepal was – and still is – finding ways to deal with the mountainous nature of most of the country, which makes access to villages difficult. The same is true, on a more limited scale, in Bhutan. Though the Vietnamese authorities in the early 1980s – five years after the war – were still focused on rehabilitation, UNICEF assistance was directed at long-term development, which included approaches and methods that were as yet largely unfamiliar t...