NORTH KIVU, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 12 December 2008
– UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Mia Farrow is visiting conflict-affected North Kivu, on a three-day mission to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Her goal is to witness the devastating
impact of the recent fighting, which has let to an estimated 300,000 displaced people in the last three months. The total number of internally displaced is around one million, or 20 per cent of the
entire North Kivu population. "I have come here to better understand how people are coping with this crisis and what needs to be done," Ms. Farrow said. "It's comforting coming
with NGOs – UNICEF is here doing their level best to sustain people, and that gives you hope. Coming without them, you might be more depressed, because what can you do?"Terrible conditions for childrenChildren, as always, are among the most vulnerable and the condition of newly displaced children and women is desperate. Thousands have
had very little to eat since fleeing. Their access to clean water and health care has been minimal. Hundreds of children are presumed to have been separated from their families, forced to fend for
their survival on their own. In Kayna, Ms. Farrow visited a therapeutic feeding centre that had been looted by armed groups. "I'm thinking, on November 11, this would have been full of
children, sick children," Ms. Farrow commented. "How can100 armed men come and chase sick and severely malnourished children into the forest, take everything they had, including the little
food that they had, therapeutic feeding stuff, their milk – and how can they square that with themselves?"For the second year in a row, the
school year that just started has been disrupted for tens of thousands of children. Ms. Farrow spoke with concerned parents in Rutshuru, a village that is now under rebel control."Even in
the schools everything was looted, all the material, everything," one parent explained to Ms. Farrow.Displacement creates emergency situationMs.
Farrow is also visiting areas of displacement in North Kivu to see how UNICEF and its partners are responding to the needs of children and their families in an area where the violence seems to
continue without an end in sight.Ms. Farrow was deeply affected by what she saw, as well as by the children who greeted her in the camp, saying,"There are perpetrators, and there are
victims, and here is where I am, looking at the victims, and feeling all that you feel for them, because they're caught between these crosscurrents of violence."I'm really happy that I'm
with UNICEF because I'm not actually one person," she continued. "I'm with UNICEF, and the staff here are really working night and day trying to address the emergency situation. But also
just as a human being, what is my human responsibility even beyond UNICEF? Where do I go with this? What will I write? Who will I talk to? What is my moral mandate?"
A nurse attends to bus accident victims in a hospital at Nawalparasi December 12, 2008. A school bus crashed in southwest Nepal, killing at least 22 people, most of them children ...
