While UNICEF, like most bureaucracies, has known scandal and inefficiency -- it once shipped refrigerators to Somalia that were incompatible with the local electric current -- it has remained a source of pride to many of its 7,500 employees. "You get a huge sense of satisfaction going back to a village after having inaugurated a clean water supply system," says one UNICEF veteran. "The kids are clean, their hair is combed, they have a spark of life when, before, they just had diarrhea all the time. It's an incredible high."

Although UNICEF's annual budget-slightly less than the cost of a sophisticated bomber-has never matched its ambitions, the organization has attempted to influence indirectly what it cannot change directly. To mitigate the worst effects of the debt crisis and the international recession of the 1980s, which pummeled many poor countries, UNICEF called for "adjustment with a human face," encouraging the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to cushion the poorest of the poor from the painful effects of government cuts in public services due to economic adjustment. It has encouraged special attention to the health and education of girls, knowing that investment in girls will ultimately lead to safer, more productive lives for women and their families.

Through five decades, however, UNICEF has never been able to abandon its first calling-emergency relief. Amid slaughter in Rwanda, starvation in Somalia and a genocidal war of "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia, UNICEF has continued to respond to cataclysmic suffering. To ensure that life-saving care reaches children in the midst of conflict, UNICEF has helped engineer temporary cease-fires-"Days of Tranquillity" that enable vaccination campaigns to proceed-in El Salvador and Lebanon, and "Corridors of Peace" for humanitarian relief in the Sudan, Uganda and the former Yugoslavia. The work has grown more dangerous. Macharia Kamau, a UNICEF senior program officer from Kenya, supervised emergency food distribution in Operation Lifeline Sudan in 1989. "When we got there, the civil war and drought effects were at their peak," he says. "We were bombed a couple of times." In 1993 and 1994, 19 UNICEF workers were killed in the line of duty, more than in the previous two decades.

War in the former Yugoslavia and several other parts of the world in recent years has given UNICEF a new challenge-to help salve the psychological wounds inflicted on children in the midst of conflict. Psychologists and trained volunteers working with UNICEF's local offices in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, have conducted art therapy classes in local schools and hospitals, encouraging children traumatized by war to communicate through art. The expression of fears and painful memories-as well as happy recollections and budding hopes-helps to alleviate the trauma. Stark drawings and poems by children punished by the war have been created in this psychological release process. "I swear to you, I do not kick the football like before, I do not sing the way I did," writes 11-year-old Nemanja from Sutomore in 1993. "I have locked up my bicycle, and I have locked up my smile. I have locked up my games and my childish jokes as well."

One of UNICEF's great strengths is its ability to prick the conscience and move individuals and governments to action. But war in the former Yugoslavia-which has driven more than 600,000 children from their homes, killed perhaps 15,000 and injured many more-has demonstrated the limits of such a power. Like so many tools of peace, it makes a dull weapon against barbarism. And yet, who knows what other horrors it may have kept at bay?

By: Francis Wilkinson, (excerpt from Nuturing the Children), from: A Global Affair: An Inside Look at the United Nations, published by Jones and Janello, copyright 1995, all rights reserved.