Forging Resilience in Conflict and Disaster Zones
From earthquake zones to war zones and famine hot spots, one reality is the same - children's realtime experiences can shape their lives for decades.
UPDATE 1:45 pm ET - Widespread rocket-attack warnings today in Ukraine up-ended plans to connect with Irwin Redlener and his team in Lviv. Such is life in conflict and disaster zones.
Instead, I was able to connect with Kit Miyamoto, an earthquake-focused engineer who has just arrived in Adana, Turkey, a city of 2.2 million in the impact zones. Here’s one key point he made about why so many commercial structures haven’t been “seismically strengthened”:
You can watch the full webcast (there are some ragged spots on YouTube, Facebook, or LinkedIn or on Twitter at @revkin.
Simmone Shah wrote an excellent piece for Time Magazine on this and other issues sustaining Turkey’s vulnerability to inevitable big quakes.
In southeastern Turkey and neighboring regions of Syria, the devastating impacts of a pair of major earthquakes and countless aftershocks continue to unfold. The death count, over 20,000, is awful, but so are the wider, vaster and long-lasting impacts on families, particularly children, who survived.
In the Horn of Africa, as agencies have been warning and Nick Kristof has so achingly shown, a continuing hunger crisis is poised to become a full-fledged famine driven by conflict, violence and a potent climate shock.
As the Famine Early Warning Network explained last month: “the eastern Horn of Africa has officially experienced five consecutive seasons of drought, marking the longest sequence of dry seasons ever recorded in the region.” Read more.
In Ukraine, millions of families continue to be traumatized by the impacts of Russia’s invasion.
in all of these places, a long shadow of physical, emotional, educational, economic and community impacts will shape the lives of children - and thus societies - for many years to come.
Here’s my interview last August with Irwin and Karen Redlener (also from Ukraine) as schools across that invaded nation and Poland grappled with how to educate and support millions of dislocated and traumatized children:
How You Can Help as Ukraine's Traumatized Children Face the "Back to School" Season on the Run
Almost everywhere around the Northern Hemisphere, particularly with pandemic shutdowns mostly a memory, August is bringing "back to school" stirrings.
That's no different in western Ukraine and countries like Poland where millions of Ukrainian children who have been internally dislocated or fled as refugees have settled, increasingly for the long haul, as Russia's attacks continue.
These images tweeted recently by Unicef show the determination of Ukrainian youth to thrive amid devastation.
But with September nigh, when teachers will face classrooms crowded with newcomers, there is an urgent need to bolster the capacity to recognize and respond to emotional trauma, overcome language barriers and rekindle learning journeys in children so that, once the war is over, Ukraine can have a generation capable of taking on the enormous task of rebuilding.
In a recent pop-up Sustain What conversation, I spoke with two determined practitioners working to fill gaps and make this war-torn generation "future ready." They are Irwin Redlener and Karen Redlener, an American pediatrician and Columbia University disaster-policy expert and a public-health professional who, together for 51 years, have focused on helping children in distress, starting in eastern Arkansas in 1971 and never stopping.
Since February, they have been working with partners to build an initiative providing mental health and educational support to Ukrainian children who are either refugees in Warsaw, Poland, or internally displaced to Lviv. One focus is setting up training for Polish and Ukrainian educators in how to screen for conditions in students that could hinder learning.
I caught up with the Redleners virtually in Warsaw after their latest visit to Lviv. Click to learn much more about their Ukraine Children's Action Project.
Their effort is just one of dozens of projects being pursued or supported by thousands of people to boost the welfare of Ukrainian families. But it's worth a deeper look because they bring so much experience to this arena. You'll learn more about their backgrounds in the transcribed conversation below, which I've edited for length and clarity.
It's worth noting three things:
These impacts on children's wellbeing come atop more brutal direct harms; Unicef recently estimated two children are being killed each day in the onslaught and fighting.
Russia's invasion is also worsening food and energy insecurity in tens of millions of low-income households around the world. The first shipment of grain from Ukraine's blockaded ports is en route to Lebanon but the food gap from the war is enormous.
For hundreds of thousands of children from eastern Ukraine, the invasion simplify amplified and intensified wartime impacts they've been enduring for many years, as this Unicef report from 2017 shows:
Here's my conversation with the Redleners on YouTube, but you can also watch and (as important!) share it on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter:
Your turn
What programs have you found that are helping with kids or families or other vital work in this war zone, or others? Please post them in the comment thread and I'll add them here.
Back in February, one of my favorite journalists on the disinformation beat, Jane Lytvynenko, posted an excellent resource hub that's still useful.
Related reading and viewing
A March Sustain What post: As Russian Attacks on Civilians Mount, a Look at Pathways Toward, and Away from, Atrocity
The Notes From Poland website has good coverage of challenges related to the surge of students from Ukraine. Here's one: 200,000 Ukrainian refugee children face a steep learning curve at Polish schools.
Here's my Sustain What conversation on the impact of Russia's invasion on food security, both within Ukraine and the many countries relying on its productive farms: From Breadbasket to Battleground – Russia’s Attack on Food Security.
In October 2020, in the pre-vaccine days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I spoke with Irwin Redlener about another epic disruption of lives in critical early years:
Sustain What: A Disaster-Focused Pediatrician on Childhood Dreams Denied
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Hi Andy -- I was watching your live stream on YouTube yesterday and I wanted to follow up on a question I had. Do you know of any organizations in Ukraine that are accepting children’s clothing donations?
Thanks for keeping the spotlight on the suffering Andy.
Such horrors inflicted on children and other innocents will continue to occur over and over again without end all over the planet until such time as we stop accepting this suffering. Those suffering today are but a tiny fraction of those who will suffer until we stop accepting the suffering. What does not accepting the suffering mean?
Not accepting all this preventable suffering means shifting our focus away from the day to day details of the latest headlines and towards the source of so many of these problems. Violent men.
Until we turn our attention to the primary source of all this suffering, we're embracing and accepting an ongoing pattern which if left untouched will continue to multiply the suffering that's happening today on in to the future, with no end in sight. The war in Ukraine will some day end, only to be replaced by some other orgy of violence. Generation after generation after generation of innocents will continue to experience what's happening today in Ukraine, until the day when violent men either crash this civilization, or maybe the entire species.
Consider the pandemic. We've identified the source of the infection, and are trying to remove it. Our response has been far from perfect, but at least we didn't declare ourselves impotent to address the source of the threat. Violent men are a virus that has infected the human race. We'll know that we care about the suffering children in Ukraine when we stop telling ourselves that there's nothing we can do about this infection.
But, but, what can we do?
This is the question we ask when we don't want to do anything. We'll sit on our hands waiting for someone to make a suggestion, and then we'll tell them why it won't work. And then we'll go back to accepting the suffering of innocents.
We'll know we're ready to leave that pattern of denial behind when we can clearly set as our goal ridding this planet of violent men. We don't know how yet, but that doesn't stop us from being determined to figure it out.
It's them or us folks. We get rid of the violent men, or they will get rid of us. Once that's understood, the solutions will start coming.
Imagine a 90%+ reduction in violence at every level of society. Imagine trillions of new dollars available for building a better world. Imagine world peace. We can have that, if we're willing to pay for it.