UK National Committee for UNICEF concludes 5-day visit to China; projects visited in Tianjin and Shaanxi and Yunnan provinces.A high-level delegation from the UNICEF UK National Committee ("Natcom") left China on Friday after spending five days visiting UNICEF projects. The delegation was led by UK Natcom President, Lord Puttnam, the Oscar-winning producer of some forty critically-acclaimed films including "Midnight Express", "The Killing Fields", "Bugsy Malone" and "Chariots of Fire". Lord Puttnam was accompanied by Lady Puttnam, the Chairman of the UK Natcom, Mr David Stanton and a leading supporter of UNICEF, Ms Geraldine Whittaker. Three members of the UK Natcom's Fundraising team completed the delegation which has been in China to see UNICEF's work and explore possibleoopportunities for future cooperation.
Their first day, Monday, was spent in Tianjin where in the morning they visited a kindergarten and households in the surrounding area, before moving on to the Tianta street community Early Childhood Development centre. There the delegation was briefed on the Centre's activities by UNICEF's government counterparts from the Education Ministry and then saw for themselves how community volunteers were working with parents to improve their parenting skills. In the afternoon they visited the Bilingual Bicultural ("Bi Bi"). Project for Deaf Children where they were greatly impressed both by the commitment of its Director and his staff and the joyfulness and self-confidence of the children participating in this pilot project. The next day, Tuesday, the delegation left for Shaanxi province where they first visited "the eighth wonder of the world", the Terracotta Warriors of Xi'an and the Shaanxi History museum. There they were expertly guided through exhibits covering the full six millennia of Chinese civilization.
Early on Wednesday morning they drove for two hours to Mazui Village, Yao County where they visited a UNICEF-supported Water and Environmental Sanitation (WES) Project designed to fully involve the community in the planning, operation and maintenance of the facilities. They visited a water pumping station to which the community had contributed labour and materials and now were in full charge of running and maintaining the water supply system.
The UK Natcom delegation then moved on to a nearby primary school, where all the children received UNICEF T-shirts and baseball caps as well as colouring sets, badges and balloons the delegation had brought all the way from London. Later that day, the delegation flew on to Yunann Province, reaching the provincial capital, Kunming, late in the evening.
On Thursday morning, the team visited the Kunming Police Academy where life-skills training on HIV/AIDS was being conducted in a highly participatory manner with out-of-school adolescents. The delegation members joined in with games and role plays designed to communicate the "learn, share and care" principles underlying the UNICEF-assisted project. Lord Puttnam later described this session as the best role-play he had ever seen on HIV/AIDS due to its simplicity and directness and the very visible involvement of the out-of-school adolescents. The delegation met with an HIV-positive former drug-user who was there at the training to talk very openly and also movingly about his life and the difficulties he was now facing.
While on the plane to Kunming, the delegation had come across an article in the South China Morning Post on a project for street children being run by a former accountant from Hong Kong, Andrew Lok. Since the Jiaxin Children's Assistance Centre was similar in scope to a UNICEF pilot project in Zhengzhou, phone calls were quickly made and a visit arranged to the Centre that same day. The Centre's director explained how the project was a local NGO supported by the Yunnan Provincial Civil Affairs Department and World vision. Its aim was to provide integrated services to street children to get them off the streets and back into the community, with some of the children later finding places at the local mainstream school which the delegation went on to visit. After sitting-,in on some of the Centre's activities and meeting with volunteers and children, the delegation presented the children at the Centre with a whole variety of sports equipment with which they then played with the children.
On their final morning in China, the delegation met with the UNICEF China Representative, Dr Christian Voumard, and other staff who had accompanied the visitors to the field. The debriefing session provided an opportunity for the team to ask additional questions and share their observations on the projects they had visited during the five days of their visit. Overall, they had been particularly pleased to find project activities which had clearly not been specially orchestrated for their visit and they had also been impressed by the commitment of .those running the projects. The "Bi Bi" project was picked-out for special praise in this regard with the dissemination of best practices seen as a key role UNICEF could help play in China. The delegation were particularly interested in how the project might be brought to other parts of China as well as in learning more about how preventable causes of deafness could be addressed. The delegation felt that projects of such high technical quality, as also witnessed by the joy and expressed aspirations of the children, deserved to be supported so that more deaf children could benefit from them.
The WES project in Mazui Village, Yao County was also given an excellent rating by the team, showing how a whole community could directly help in its own transformation through the genuine participation of its members. The HIV/AIDS life skills project also garnered the enthusiasm of the delegation who had been impressed how police normally focused on law enforcement could take such an active role in prevention. The incorporation of really powerful games and role plays, as well as the participation of the person living with HIV, were singled out for particular praise in this regard.
All agreed that this had been a most successful visit which would pave the way for further developing cooperation between the UK Natcom and the China office. This cooperation in recent years had included a pilot anti-trafficking project in Sichuan, which time had unfortunately not allowed them to visit on this trip. Following the debriefing session, the delegation left for Kunming airport where they boarded a flight to Hong Kong from where they would fly back to London with a greatly improved understanding of the importance of UNICEF's work in China.
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