XUNICEF News and Views

Earlier this week, our "Photo Memory of the Week" featured a group photo shared by Niloufar Pourzand, capturing members of the joint UNICEF–WHO emergency mission to Iraq.

 News and photo shared by Niloufar Pourzand

2 September 1998 In September 1998, I was living in Ottawa, Canada in the second half of a year’s leave from UNICEF. My wife Patsy and I had just returned home from a holiday in Nova Scotia. On 2 September, flight Swissair 111 from New York crashed into the sea just off the coast of Nova Scotia, with the loss of all on board, including not a few UN staff on their way to Geneva – colleagues and friends on board “the UN shuttle”. Carol Bellamy called from New York to ask me to go back to Halifax (the provincial capital) to offer any support I could to the bereaved families of deceased staff from UNICEF and other agencies – families who would be arriving there imminently. On the plane to Halifax, I sat next to a local businessman. We talked and I told him why I was travelling. When we landed, he handed me the keys to his minivan, parked at the airport. He gave me his phone number and said: “Call me when you’ve finished what you came to do”. Just one of the countless acts of generosity and...

The World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA), Jomtien, Thailand, 5-9 March 1990 by Nigel Fisher, Former Deputy Executive Secretary, WCEFA Lunches of chicken with Ministry of Education counterparts, expertly incinerated (the chicken, that is, not the counterparts) by a UNICEF Representative in an apartment in Aden, can have far-reaching consequences. Along with working on UCI in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in the mid to late 80s, UNICEF Aden also worked closely with the education ministry on rolling out a nationwide literacy programme, with a particular focus on women’s literacy. This somehow came to the attention of Nyi Nyi in far-off New York and in late 1988, I was unceremoniously yanked out of the PDRY to go to New York. Together with a few other agencies, UNICEF was exploring the possibility of launching a major global initiative on basic education for all and I was to join the team. Manzoor Ahmed was our education chief at that time. These discussions...

In May 1994, Jim Grant phoned me in Amman. “Nigel, you told me you want to work in emergency operations. I need you to go to Rwanda”. I arrived in Nairobi in the first days of June 1994, where a small team from the evacuated Rwanda office was relocated. I was told that we would probably be based in ESARO until December, but the opportunity to fly into Kigali for a few days in early July, on a Canadian military C-130, changed that. Deborah Dishman, Marcel Rudasingwa and I flew in together. Marcel had lost all his children in the genocide, but somehow carried on, with incredible fortitude; he was utterly invaluable in those early days of our re-establishment in Rwanda. At Kigali airport, we were met with the overpowering stench of death and an almost-empty city. The UNICEF office had been mined and booby-trapped, so we slept in the vacant WFP office. The Rwandan Patriotic Front had taken over Kigali just days before and was pursuing the remnants of the previous genocidal government and i...

Always one for perfect timing, I landed with my family in Jordan at the start of my new assignment as DRD for MENA and Area Rep for Jordan, Syria, The Occupied Territories …. and Djibouti, on 2 August 1990, the day that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Instead of the anticipated leisurely settling-in period, within days I was out in the Jordanian desert near Azraq with Government, Badia (desert) police and Red Crescent officials – and subsequently, often with Queen Noor - organizing the reception of the first refugees arriving from the Gulf as they cross into the country. I became UNICEF’s point person for the refugee response in Jordan, to which about a million refugees came in a few short months. Given the small UNHCR presence in the country and with a young IOM focused on airlifting South Asian refugees back home, UNICEF led the construction of refugee camps with the Jordanian government. The ‘UNICEF camps’ gained notoriety for having the highest ratio of latrines to population recor...