Lebanese 'children are asking for name tags — in case they die, so their families can find them'
Ettie Higgins: 'This is a humanitarian catastrophe, especially for children, and they have suffered the most.' Photo: UNICEFLebanon/X
Anybody with a young child will be well used to writing their name onto things like their pencil case, lunch boxes, school jumpers and copies. It’s for the usual reasons — easier to find them after they go missing.
In Lebanon today, they also write down children’s names but for a different reason. If they get killed, someone knows who to give their body to. This is according to Ettie Higgins, one of the people helping lead the massive humanitarian relief efforts underway to help children in war-torn Lebanon.
The Irish-born deputy head of UNICEF Lebanon’s operations was speaking just hours after she had been to the border between Syria and Lebanon. “We were at the border speaking to children,” she said.
“The repeated ‘ask’ from them is ‘please put a tag on my wrist with my parents’ phone numbers and with the names of family members’.
"That's what children as young as seven are asking us to do. "
After she returned from the border, she was at home for only a few hours before she was due to go back on the road again, this time to get to a “very hard to reach area” in southern Lebanon with a convoy of trucks.
Like any humanitarian action in the country these days, it would have been a risky undertaking. At least 90 rescue workers, paramedics and firefighters have been killed and injured since the start of Israel’s bombing campaign last month.
Two members of UNHCR — the UN refugee agency — have also been killed, while UNIFIL peacekeepers have been targeted by Israeli forces, with at least five injured so far.
Members of the Lebanese Red Cross have also been injured and hospitals have been targeted in a war that has so far led to an estimated 2,400 deaths and around 12,000 injured in Lebanon.
“From the humanitarian perspective, we have a system in place where we notify the relevant authorities and the relevant entities that we are heading into an area, and we will wait for clearance before we operate in these areas,” she explains.
Any questions about the risks involved in her job and the jobs of others like her and she deftly moves onto the reason for this interview: children.
Before Israel started its aerial bombardment last month, the country had absorbed an estimated 1.5 million refugees — whose children UNICEF have been helping — from the brutal Syrian Civil War.
Lebanon has also since 2019 had to endure a seemingly never-ending economic depression — which led to the currency being devalued by 98% — and then the outbreak of covid in February 2020.
The Port of Beirut blast — one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions ever — in August that year killed more than 218 people and left around 300,000 homeless.
It was then followed by a cholera outbreak that led to more than 23 deaths. Ettie is now dealing with the latest cholera outbreak, which was declared a few days ago by Lebanon's Ministry of Health.
She said: “We are finding extremely vulnerable and already traumatized children and we just don't have the resources to meet all the needs of all of them.
“This is a humanitarian catastrophe, especially for children, and they have suffered the most.
“Imagine if you're a five-year-old child in Lebanon, regardless of your nationality, whether you're Syrian or Lebanese or Palestinian.
How, for example, does it compare to Aleppo, where Ettie — who has worked in some of the worst war zones around the world for UNICEF over the past 20 years — has worked in the past.
“I would say in my career, it's the fastest displacement crisis I've ever witnessed,” she says.
“We were preparing for the worst case scenario, but by no means did we think that we would move to the worst case scenario as quickly as we did.”
The scale of the work ahead of them is immense, on top of the huge problems UNICEF was already dealing with before Israel started its offensive last month. More than 1.2 million people have now been displaced in the country since then.
Of these, there are an estimated 400,000 children.
“There's huge numbers of villages in the south that have been decimated, and bombing has continued, as it has every day, intensively over the last four weeks,” she said.
“Every day we see new waves of displacement, because there's new evacuation orders that are issued almost every day. The Lebanese have opened up their homes to people who have been fleeing, but they have very finite resources.
“So I think within the next few weeks and months, we're going to see those resources be completely depleted, and the situation will get much more tense and much more difficult.
The money they need will go on water and sanitation, in a country where the water system was already problematic before Israel started bombing the country.
She admits that her office is now “$8 million in debt”. This is from borrowing money, in advance of getting it back from fundraising, to pre-order urgent supplies.
For example, UNICEF Lebanon recently spent $2 million “that it doesn’t have” on 100,000 winter clothing kits.
It is part of a bigger round of borrowing to get the orders in for these and other supplies.
“We have to get the supplies on the high seas now, we can't wait for the funding because these supplies are needed immediately,” she said.
“This includes trauma kits, recreation kits, education supplies, and, importantly, winterization materials.” Other funding is needed for the country’s overwhelmed shelters.
It has around 1,100 shelters for 180,000 displaced and other disadvantaged people, almost all of which are completely full.
Some 700 of those shelters are actually public schools, and do not have the appropriate facilities for hundreds of people being housed in them now.
Ettie said: “There's no sense of normality for children now in Lebanon. They are waking up in classrooms where they're not getting an education. They don't have showers.
“They're often separated from their family members, including their grandparents, in some cases, their parents, their siblings, some of them have lost school friends or family members who've been killed in the conflict.
“So children are really, really traumatized.
“So even if we do manage to re-open the school year in the first week of November, as we're planning to do, children are going to need long-term psychosocial support.”
She added: “Children repeatedly tell us they want to go back to school.
“They tell us ‘we want to sit at a school desk and be with our friends’, and ‘we want our school bags’.
“It's the sense of normality.
“I was talking to one little girl and she was telling me how she misses the walk in her village from school to her home and she was talking about how she had missed her cats, and how she had had to leave them behind.
“Then there was another girl, 13, and she was telling me she was supposed to have gone to the orthodontist but then the war broke out.
“The wires had all separated from her braces, and she was saying she couldn’t actually eat because her mouth was torn from the wires.
“Then another child, who was about eight, was telling us how he saw the blasts happening behind him as they were fleeing their town.
“He was telling us how his dad was trying to calm them down and trying to get them to sing in the car as the blasts were happening behind them.”
To describe how anybody, let alone children, in Lebanon as “resilient” in the face of such a condensed cluster of disasters draws the same derision from Ettie as it does anybody who works in the humanitarian sector in the country.
“We removed the word resilience from a lot of our language and our communications because it's not appropriate,” she said.
“We don't use the ‘R’ word because it's just so brutally unfair that any child would have to live through this.
“So much of it is man-made, especially this humanitarian catastrophe and it's just a lack of political will that children are having to live through this.”
To donate money to UNICEF’s Gaza and Lebanon Emergency Appeal, visit their website help.unicef.org/lebanon-donate-appeal
A monthly donation of €21 can give a year's supply of clean drinking water to 25 children, or a one-off donation of €100 can supply clean drinking water to help 20 families, while €150 can give thermal blankets to protect 25 children from the cold, or €250 can provide six emergency kits with vital medicine to treat injured children.
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