Awake At Night

Afghan female students participate in a theatre performance at a school in Herat, eastern Afghanistan (file)
UNAMA/Fraidoon Poya

First Person: The ‘bravery’ of Afghanistan's girls and women

22 September 2021
Women

Afghanistan’s girls and women are showing “bravery” in the face of real “fears and pressures” following the formation of the new, de facto authorities in Afghanistan,  according to a UNICEF member of staff, one of the few westerners to remain in Kabul.

Some displaced people in Yemen have become scapegoats for the COVID-19 pandemic.
© UNHCR/Jean-Nicolas Beuze

First Person: Yemen ‘cannot even afford to worry about the coronavirus’

28 February 2021
Humanitarian Aid

In Yemen, whose people are living through a long-running, brutal war, which has led to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, COVID-19 is far from being a top priority, says the top UN refugee agency (UNHCR) official in the Arabian Peninsula country.

Sarah Copland with her son, Isaac, in New York.
Sarah Copland

First Person: A mother’s ‘indescribable’ pain six months after the Beirut explosion

13 February 2021
Peace and Security

Six months after a massive explosion destroyed much of the centre of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, a mother has been talking about the “indescribable” grief she has experienced at losing her two-year-old son to injuries sustained in the blast.

World Food Programme Executive Director, David Beasley, visits the Al Sabeen maternal hospital in Sana'a, Yemen.
WFP/Marco Frattini

Finding hope in calamity: how UN humanitarians cope on the frontline

10 July 2020
Humanitarian Aid

What does it take to help the world’s most vulnerable people, often in dangerous and unstable situations, and at considerable personal risk? In the latest season of the award-winning UN podcast, Awake At Night, host Melissa Fleming speaks to some of the Organization’s most prominent humanitarians to find out what motivates them, and how they cope.