Updated April 11, 2015.

UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, is a United Nations Program that provides both long-term and short-term crisis care to children and their families throughout the world. Often, UNICEF's care response takes the form of collecting, shipping, and distributing medical supplies to regions of the world where children are suffering from either natural disasters or military confrontations, like they are in Yemen in April 2015 and in Syria in 2014 through 2015.

Take the Yemen crisis for example. Houthi rebels stage a violent upheaval that forced the Yemeni government leadership to flee. This violent revolution spurred Yemen's neighbor, and its legitimate government's political ally Saudi Arabia, to launch airstrikes on Yemen to target and weaken the Houthi rebels, with the hope to slow their attempt to consolidate control of Yemen.

Revolution and airstrikes have created thousands of injuries and deaths, and in the first 3 weeks of the crisis nearly 1,000 Yemeni refugees fleeing the violence in Yemen in rickety fishing boats, crossing the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden to the Horn of Africa.

The destruction has severely limited Yemeni citizens' access to water, basic sanitation, and medical care. Furthermore, the spike in injuries and deaths have overwhelmed the existing health care resources of the country.

UNICEF Steps In

UNICEF collected and shipped 16,000 tons of medical supplies from its consolidation point in Denmark. The medical supplies included antibiotics, bandages, syringes, IV sets, wound care sets, procedure kits, other types of emergency medical supplies, micronutrients and water storage containers.

The process is not without numerous challenges. It's not the same as shipping cargo from one peaceful country to another for trade purposes. Shipping medical supplies into a region beset with violent revolution like Yemen, or natural disaster like Haiti's earthquake, is rarely as simple as pulling a freighter into the nearest port, offloading it onto trucks that can drive freely on roads and deliver supplies to towns and health clinics capable of receiving and distributing the supplies.

In most cases, the civic infrastructure needed to make it possible is gone. In the case of Yemen, the legitimate government has been severely compromised, and Houthi rebels with machine guns control access to whatever roads have not been destroyed by the Saudi bombing campaign. In some cases, the rebels will set up a military defense of the seaport to prevent the relief ships from docking and offloading supplies.

And the challenges don't end there. What of the refugees? The diaspora created by people fleeing the troubled area makes it even more difficult for UNICEF to locate the children and families in need. In other words, not only does UNICEF struggle to land and distribute medical supplies and food into Yemen, but it also will try to locate and comfort the refugees in bordering lands and across ocean gulfs. In the Yemeni case, UNICEF has children and families who need aid directly related to the small country of Yemen that are now physically on two separate continents.

Humanitarian aid requires the highest levels of logistics expertise. It begins with an investigation and understanding of what is needed, and predicting what soon may be needed. The next step begins the difficult work of locating massive amounts of those food and medical supplies, and transporting them to a consolidation point where they can be loaded for sea, ground, or air freight.

Then comes the political, and yes, even military expertise, required to skillfully obtain access into the troubled region and safely distribute the supplies to innocent victims trapped on the battlefield or in ground zero of the disaster.

And then, do it all over again.