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Rana Najadeh, 12, recalled her horror as she bore witness to the destruction. “I got very scared when the soldiers came to demolish our class,” she said. “I rushed out to check on my six year old brother Suleiman, who was crying.” The demolition did not end there, however, as nine other residential structures were also destroyed that day, leaving 30 children and their families homeless. 

Thankfully, UNICEF and Islamic Relief Worldwide took action to address the tragic situation, by rehabilitating the school and providing a better environment for the students. In addition, UNICEF partnered with both the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Department (ECHO), to help the traumatized children find relief from their fear and anger by providing psychosocial sessions through dance, drama, arts and play.

amic Relief Worldwide took action to address the tragic situation, by rehabilitating the school and providing a better environment for the students. In addition, UNICEF partnered with both the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Department (ECHO), to help the traumatized children find relief from their fear and anger by providing psychosocial sessions through dance, drama, arts and play. “Sometimes for children it is simply the opportunity to play and have fun – be a child – in a safe environment,” said UNICEF Deputy Special Representative, Douglas G. Higgins. “In the end, the psychosocial project is important for children to have a sense of stability, normality and opportunity to reach their potential.” Dkaika children are not the first ones to receive help however, as UNICEF has worked with ECHO since 2003 to help Palestinian children and their families cope with the conflict and violence that affects their daily lives. The activities focus on children who live in areas exposed to frequent home and school demolitions, as well as young Bedouins and children with disabilities. “We must not fail Dkaika children,” said the Deputy Special Representative. ”Education is the cornerstone for peace and security and is at the heart of equity.” var emailarticleloc = location.href; emailarticleloc = emailarticleloc.replace("http://www.unicef.org",""); emailarticleloc = emailarticleloc.replace("http://unicef.org",""); var emailarticle = "Email this article Email this article UNICEFBLOG.addentry({ linkClassName: "bloglink", image: "", title: "UNICEF provides support to Palestinian students through rehabilitation and psychosocial sessions", blurb: "DKAIKA, Occupied Palestinian Territory, 29 September 2011 - Located just 70 metres away from the Green Line - the 1949 Armistice Line – in Israeli-controlled Area ‘C’, the villagers of Dkaika are forced to suffer under the daily risk of home demolition and harassment. 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The case has prompted the government to set up a special team to help schools and board of education curb bullying. The new anti-bullying task force will be responsible for identifying cases of serious bullying at an early stage and giving advice to education boards and schools, said Hirofumi Hirano, Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, at a press conference Tuesday.

The quake Saturday, tied for the fifth largest in the world since 1900,

Chile’s government had not yet requested assistance. All international relief groups were on standby, and the International Federation of Red Crosses and Red Crescents said the Chilean Red Cross indicated that it did not need external assistance at this point.

In Talca, 167 miles south of Santiago, almost every home in the center of the city was severely damaged, and on Saturday night, people slept on the streets in the balmy night air near fires built with wood from destroyed homes. All but two of the local hospital’s 13 wings were in ruins, said Claudio Martínez, a doctor at the hospital. “We’re only keeping the people in danger of dying,” he said. Dr. Martínez said the hospital staff had tried to take some people to Santiago for treatment in the morning, but the roads were blocked at the time.

Cellphone and Internet service was sporadic throughout the country, considered one of the most wired in Latin America, complicating rescue efforts.

The earthquake struck at 3:34 a.m. in central Chile, centered roughly 200 miles southwest of Santiago at a depth of 22 miles, the United States Geological Survey reported.

The Geological Survey said that another earthquake on Saturday, a 6.3-magnitude quake in northern Argentina, was unrelated. In Salta, Argentina, an 8-year-old boy was killed and two of his friends were injured when a wall collapsed, The Associated Press reported.

The most powerful earthquake ever recorded was also in Chile: a 9.5-magnitude quake struck in the spring of 1960 that struck near Concepción and set off a series of deadly tsunamis that killed people as far away as Hawaii and Japan.

But that earthquake, which killed nearly 2,000 people and left more than two million homeless at the time, prepared officials and residents in the region for future devastating effects. Shortly after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck in Valparaíso in 1985, the country established strict building codes, according to Andre Filiatrault, the director of the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research at the University at Buffalo.

In Tehran, Iran’s capital, Dr. Bilham has calculated that one million people could die in a predicted quake similar in intensity to the one in Haiti, which the Haitian government estimates killed 230,000. (Some Iranian geologists have pressed their government for decades to move the capital because of the nest of surrounding geologic faults.)

Ali Agaoglu, a Turkish developer ranked 468th last year on the Forbes list of billionaires, described how in the 1970s, salty sea sand and scrap iron were routinely used in buildings made of reinforced concrete. “At that time, this was the best material,” he said, according to a translation of the interview. “Not just us, but all companies were doing the same thing. If an earthquake occurs in Istanbul, not even the army will be able to get in.”

Istanbul stands out among threatened cities in developing countries because it is trying to get ahead of the risk. A first step was an earthquake master plan drawn up for the city and the federal government by Dr. Erdik’s team and researchers at three other Turkish universities in 2006. Such a plan is a rarity outside of rich cities like Tokyo and Los Angeles.Carrying out its long list of recommendations has proved more challenging, given that the biggest source of political pressure in Istanbul, as with most crowded cities, is not an impending earthquake but traffic, crime, jobs and other real-time troubles.Nonetheless, with the urgency amplified by the lessons from Haiti’s devastation, Istanbul is doing what it can to gird for its own disaster.

But a push is also coming from the bottom, as nonprofit groups, recognizing the limits of centralized planning, train dozens of teams of volunteers in poor districts and outfit them with radios, crowbars and first-aid kits so they can dig into the wreckage when their neighborhoods are shaken.

Under a program financed with more than $800 million in loans from the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, and more in the pipeline from other international sources, Turkey is in the early stages of bolstering hundreds of the most vulnerable schools in Istanbul, along with important public buildings and more than 50 hospitals. With about half of the nearly 700 schools assessed as high priorities retrofitted or replaced so far, progress is too slow to suit many Turkish engineers and geologists tracking the threat. But in districts where the work has been done or is under way — those closest to the Marmara Sea and the fault — students, parents and teachers express a sense of relief tempered by the knowledge that renovations only cut the odds of calamity.

“I hope it’s enough,” said Serkan Erdogan, an English teacher at the Bakirkoy Cumhuriyet primary school close to the Marmara coast, where $315,000 was spent to add reinforced walls, jackets of fresh concrete and steel rebar around old columns and to make adjustments as simple as changing classroom doors to open outward, easing evacuations. “The improvements are great, but the building may still collapse,” he said. “We have to learn how to live with that risk. The children need to know what they should do.”In a fifth-grade classroom, the student training that goes with the structural repairs was evident as Nazan Sati, a social worker, asked the 11-year-olds what they would do if an earthquake struck right at that moment. At first a forest of hands shot toward the ceiling. Ms. Sati quickly told them to show, not tell. In a mad, giggling scramble, the students dove beneath their desks. But the threat for children, and their parents, also lies outside the school walls, in mile upon mile of neighborhoods filled with structures called gecekondu, meaning “landed overnight,” because they were constructed seemingly instantly as hundreds of thousands of migrants from rural regions flowed into the city seeking work in the past decade or two.

According to US AID, there are approximately 600,000 displaced people living in 416 makeshift camps in Port-au-Prince. Sanitation conditions in the camps remain a grave concern. With heavy seasonal rains fast approaching, the population is extremely vulnerable to exposure and water-born disease.

Two leading directors of Doctors Without Borders have called the relief effort to date "broadly insufficient." In a March 5 interview, they say that, “The lack of shelter and the hygiene conditions represent a danger not only in terms of public health, but they are also an intolerable breach of the human dignity of all these people.”

Conditions are also critical outside the earthquake zone. Cap Haitien, Haiti’s second largest city located 120 km north of Port au Prince, has received an estimated influx of 50,000 refugees. Its mayor, Michel St. Croix, recently told the Miami Herald, “We need housing, sanitation, security -- we need everything.'' He said the city has received next to no assistance from the United Nations nor the International Red Cross.

In an interview with Associated Press on March 5, Haiti’s Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive repeated his government’s growing concern with the international aid effort. "Too many people are raising money without any controls, and don't explain what they're doing with it."

Farmer warned against the “trauma vultures” descending on Haiti. He asked why so many years of aid and charitable funds going to Haiti has left the country poorer than ever.

Canada was one of the few large countries in the world that did not send civilian emergency rescue teams to Haiti. Its official aid mission arrived one week after the earthquake in the form of two warships and 2,000 military personnel. They pitched into the relief effort and earned praise for their work. But most of the assistance brought by the military, including its field hospital in Léogâne and its emergency health center in Jacmel, have now been withdrawn.

“The Canadian military is not a relief agency. It helped out with short-term needs. Aid and reconstruction is a long-term process. Who is going to pick up where the military’s work left off?”

Prior to the earthquake, Cuba had some 350 health professionals volunteering in Haiti. That number, including graduates and students from the Latin American Medical School (ELAM) in Cuba, has expanded considerably. Since 2005, 550 Haitian doctors have graduated from ELAM. The school received its first Haitian students in 1999. Currently, there are 570 students from Haiti attending the school.

Timely and informative articles and videos are also posted to the website of the Canada Haiti Action Network (http://canadahaitiaction.ca/) and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (http://ijdh.org/).

“When children suffer from an acute fear, they tend to depend on their mothers more for their safety, and display regressive and immature behavior,” said Naotaka Shinfuku, professor of psychiatry at Seinan Gakuin University in Fukuoka, who studied the impact of the 1995 earthquake in the Japanese city of Kobe. “It’s good for children’s mental health to learn and play in a safe environment if they wish to do so.”

“Kids saw their friends for the first time in days,” Saijo, 53, said. “They were very happy, hugging each other -- something we hadn’t seen in a while.”

At the Sakuragi Hanazono kindergarten, where Junko Kamada began her teaching career almost 40 years ago, that means not succumbing to grief. “The teachers are incredibly sad,” Kamada said. “They know children they have cared for have died, but they are trying to get the school back on its feet.”

The current system also leaves underfunded municipalities in charge of high school education nationwide. This has starved most schools of resources, while leaving some wealthy neighborhood schools well off. Chile’s small upper class sends its children to private schools or even overseas for their education.