QUETTA, 31 October 2010 - Thousands of flood victims in Quetta, capital of Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan Province, say they are stranded and unable to get home.Most of the displaced arrived in mid-August looking for relief aid after floods inundated districts in eastern Balochistan and neighbouring Sindh province. More than two months later, they say they do not have the means to get back.Inadequate transport arrangements by the provincial governments, combined with the fact that many who left homes in a panic did not carry much cash, are key factors in the slow rate of return. Of the 61,000 displaced who arrived in Balochistan, Pakistan’s poorest province, nearly 90 percent are st...

By Diane Coulter KHUNTI, India, 2 September 2010 – Bilkani Sangha shakes her head in amazement when she recalls how she first fed her newborn baby. She remembers dipping a cloth into warm goat’s milk mixed with honey and jungle herbs, then slowly dripping the concoction into her tiny child’s mouth. She wasn’t allowed to breastfeed her son for almost two days until all the colostrum – the highly nutritious first milk produced by a mother after childbirth – could be squeezed from her breasts and discarded. Older villagers considered the milk ‘dirty’ and ‘useless.’ As a new mother, Ms. Sangha wasn’t given any food to eat for three days, just turmeric water as pa...

21 July 21, 2010, Pakistan - She survived the nightmare, but three of her six children, as well as her husband, did not. In fact, Muzammil Akbar says, it was her husband Akbar Ali who had fed poison to their three eldest children before handing her a "handful of white tablets".Akbar, 32, recalls her husband as telling her: "‘What’s the point of dying a little every day? Let’s just die once and get over with this dog’s life.’"Akbar says she was overcome with shock and was soon swallowing the tablets her husband, a rickshaw driver, gave to her. Released from the hospital where she spent more than two weeks in June, Akbar found herself locked out of her in- laws’ home and denied the...

15 July 2010 Sri Lanka – Thousands of schoolchildren in Ampara district, eastern Sri Lanka, recently cheered in a new era in education, with marching bands playing and UNICEF flags waving during official ceremonies in their villages.Along with local community leaders, they were celebrating the opening of six new schools – the result of a UNICEF Sri Lanka investment totalling $3.8 million. Thousands of students will benefit from the UNICEF-funded schools.But it was a solemn moment, too – a moment to remember the tsunami that destroyed their old schools and villages in December 2004. The scars of the tsunami are still scattered along the coastline here, tombstones and ruinsfrom the time ...