From the Ground: Never Give Up for Children!

Venezuela. June 2020. As soon as the quarantine started, the UNICEF team headed by the Head of Office looked at ways to continue critical services for children across the three field offices. From the onset, the goal of deploying field missions is clear: ensure the safety of staff and reach children and adolescents even in the most remote places to deliver much-needed supplies and other items required to mitigate the outbreak of COVID-19. 

Since day one of the lockdown, the team took immediate measures to protect themselves from contamination and build resilience by making arrangements to ensure food, water, protective devices, information-sharing, and medicines to families. Once this was done, in a rather swift move, the team then turn its attention to the most vulnerable beneficiaries of UNICEF assistance and looked at ways it can move its expertise across the country to better serve children, adolescents, and pregnant women.  

In the first weeks of quarantine, part of the Country Office staff headed by the Representative, Herve Ludovic de Lys, traveled by road to southern Venezuela due to the suspension of local flights.

Once in the Bolívar state, using the first UNICEF inland chartered flight, they accompanied our local office colleagues to Santa Elena de Uairen, at the border with Brazil, and delivered vital supplies to Venezuelan families returning from neighboring countries.  They also visited one of the main reference hospitals for children where UNICEF renovated the pediatric and maternity ward and drilled 2 boreholes to resupply the health facilities with clean water.

In Delta Amacuro state, they identified and visited a boat hospital that has ceased operations for 5 years and started the planning process for resuming services of these floating health facilities with the aim of serving 100,000 indigenous people living in isolated areas of the Orinoco delta. 

After several weeks on the ground, the Central Office team came back to Caracas to plan their next journey, now to the western states of Tachira and Apure. Usually, it would take 13 hours by road to get to San Cristobal, the capital city of Tachira state, where the UNICEF office is located. Our team made it in two days because of weather and traffic, but also because they had to spend the night in one of the five states they go through after reaching their final destination.