I believe the children must win





By Ralph Fiennes
The Telegraph
Family
December 14, 2001
Ralph Fiennes is inspired by the work being done for victims of conflict by Unicef, a beneficiary of this year's Telegraph appeal








STANDING in the aisles of Unicef's warehouse in Copenhagen, I feel hopeful. On either side of me, sturdy metal shelving reaches 40 feet high and extends the length of two football pitches. Stacked high are box after box of emergency supplies.

Each box carries a label with its destination. It's like reading a roll call of disaster: Sudan, Kosovo, Somalia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone. There's no mention of Afghanistan, because emergency supplies are continually being flown there and there's no time for them to rest on a shelf.

These boxes contain essential supplies for childcare and health. There are maternity kits, vaccines, sterilisation equipment, rehydration tablets, blankets, generators.





Ralph Fiennes in Unicef's Copenhagen warehouse, surrounded by the aid boxes that offer hope for children. 'Somewhere, a child's ideas can live,' he says

The crisis in Afghanistan claims the most attention at the moment. Twenty-four Unicef flight have left Copengaen since September. While we were here, a 25th flight was loading up. But while other countries that need emergency support are off the front page, the continual flow of supplies to them doesn't stop.

The campaign for "awareness" goes on. With the photographer, Tom Craig, and Alison Tilbe from Unicef UK, we are being shown the works - it's extremely impressive. Our host is Deirdre O'Shea; her natural warmth and enthusiasm have made us feel extremely welcome.

I know she receives many visitors and is well practised at reeling off information and statistics. I feel a little dizzy trying to unravel facts and figures, trying to make a picture of them. Of course, it's very clear - all over the world, not just in Afghanistan, thousands of children suffer and are neglected. Poverty, disease, Aids, war and natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods are the culprits, one often linked to another.

News reports can overwhelm us. We can be appalled, we can sympathise. But what is hard to grasp is the sense that, at this moment, people are working, organising - not just at an executive level, but on the floor, in the warehouse. A man is packing a box of oral rehydration tablets; maternity kits are being prepared; education kits are being packed. And somewhere, tomorrow, those boxes will be unpacked and a child with life-threatening diarrhoea will be saved, a baby will be born in more hygienic circumstances, a girl will receive her first exercise book and her first pencil.

Just over a year ago, I flew to Uganda to look at the work Unicef is doing to combat the Aids epidemic. I met many extraordinary women and men, doctors and teachers. At a school outside Kampala, students performed scenes from Sara - a comic strip African heroine whose adventures are designed to entertain and instruct. Usually, Sara alerts her friends to an Aids danger - a predatory male or a naive boyfriend. The Ugandan children performed with relish.

At Bundebugyo, a camp for internally displaced persons on the Uganda/Congo border, I met children whose schools were tents or simply a corrugated roof. These children live in fear of being kidnapped by marauding militia, who would force them to be killers. Bundebugyo exists because families are clustering together for safety. Sanitation, health and water supply are big concerns. But these children were quiet, attentive and eager for contact.

Education is being prioritised by Unicef. Not just emergency schooling, post-crisis, but in the long term. Alan Court, director of Unicef's supply division, stresses the importance of providing children with an environment of "normalcy". Different crises in different cultures throw up mammoth problems. What is "normalcy" to a boy in Afghanistan, I ask myself? What is it to a girl in Kosovo? I don't know, but it's a vast remove from anything I've ever experienced.

Unicef's education initiative does not seek to impose, but to initiate and integrate. It does, however, aim to address the huge bias towards education for boys at the expense of girls in so many cultures. It begins with the "school in a box". This is a 40lb aluminium trunk containing pencils, pencil sharpeners, erasers, exercise books, slates, paper scissors and blackboard paint.

In Copenhagen, we admire a display version of the box; each costs $285. Within an hour or so of receiving it, a teacher can turn a piece of wood or metal into a blackboard and take the children through their first words or sums - perhaps their first ideas. When the contents of the box are depleted, or have run out, the teachers are supposed to replace them with local supplies. Communities are encouraged to become independent.

After the school in a box, there is Unicef's "fun in a box". This is more sport oriented: skittles, footballs, volleyballs, powdered chalk to mark out a pitch. So, this time, instead of the blackboard, I imagine a dusty piece of turf marked out for a game of football. Will the girls join in? Are they allowed to join in? To my mind, this recreation box has a slight male bias - but not everyone agrees.

"Girls play soccer," Deirdre insists. But she goes on to illustrate the terrible bias against education for girls and women in so many countries. One statistic is that two out of every three children not in schools are girls.

Unicef wants to encourage a sense of stability for a child. These are things I have taken for granted. In my own family, my sisters are the strong ones. I have to make personal connections here - first remembering my own childhood and the attention granted to my imagination. I see it repeated when my nephew Titan is rapt by the story of Hamlet, or my nieces, buoyant with freedom and energy, want to play mischievously and without fear, with spontaneous, God-given chutzpah.

Recently, Hana Loftus, the 21-year-old daughter of some friends, produced a highly mature production of Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw. This is an opera I find deeply disturbing. The adult world, in the form of unhappy, malign ghosts, encroaches, corrupts and destroys the children's prerogative of innocence. Essentially, the children's individual momentum towards knowledge is taken from them. In the face of the ghosts' oppression, particularly that of the male spirit Peter Quint, their teacher is helpless.

Remembering the faces of children that Unicef is helping - children who have all the potential to breathe freely with their imagination and acquired knowledge - I am reminded of what Peter Quint can represent. It is the adult world become obsessive, manipulative, violent and intolerant. It is the forces of bigoted politics, war and, of course, religious extremism.

I reflect on the current situation in Afghanistan, and I believe, angrily, that the aid agencies must win. The children must win.

I watch one "school in a box" glide down from its shelf on a forklift truck. It is put on to an aeroplane. It could travel to Sudan, to Macedonia or Uganda - but I imagine it in Afghanistan. After vaccines, food and sanitation have been dealt with, the box can be opened. Somewhere in Afghanistan, a child's ideas, a girl's ideas, can live. Imagination is free.


Unicef, Children of Conflict is part of this year's Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal. The other charities are Demelza House Children's Hospice and The Princess Royal Trust for Carers. Donations can be sent to PO Box 45, Colchester CO2 8JQ. Make cheques payable to the Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal; please specify which charity you wish your donation to go to or whether it should be divided between all three. Credit card donations can be made by calling 0870 8303 428.



 

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