World Refugee Day

Friday, June 19, 2009

Celebrate World Refugee Day on Saturday, June 20th!

From the UNHCR…
For the first time in history, the world will be able to witness refugee camp life - real time, LIVE.

www.RefugeeDayLive.org is an interactive web event where you can give, share and relate to refugees using cutting-edge VSee communication technologies. If you have ever been interested in the world of refugees, this is your chance to reach out to them in a global show of support.

You can participate by submitting video recordings, chat, or text messages, and even Tweets. Some of these messages will be responded to live by refugees. If you organize an activity on or for World Refugee Day, upload your video feed to RefugeeDayLive.org to show refugees you care.

During the event, there will be real-time video feeds of daily refugee camp life:

* Meet teachers and children in their school setting

* A refugee mother cooking a meal for her children using refugee rations

* Let a refugee give you a guided tour of the camp

* See where a family lives, sleeps, cooks, and where a child does his or her homework

* Enjoy local songs and dances

* Watch UNHCR front-line staff talking about their work.

This is YOUR chance to gain real insights into a world seldom seen. Go to www.refugeedaylive.org now for more information. 

BBC Documentary:  “My World: the Homecoming”

Monday, June 08, 2009

Having seen unspeakable horrors, one would imagine that many refugees would have no desire to return to their home countries.  Some of our refugee incoming college freshman feel differently.  They say that they have a duty to work in their home country to make a difference and give to others the opportunity they have received in the United States.  One of our students says that she would like to work as a pharmacist for Doctors Without Borders in her home country of Rwanda because she knows that there are still people suffering and another student would like to work as a nurse in the same country.  The BBC documentary found below is a similar tale of a refugee woman returning to Africa to become a relief worker.

Go here for the audio documentary.

Most people would be only too keen to get out of the refugee camps where they spent their childhood but Gemma Tracee Apiku cannot wait to return.

She spent eight years of her young life as a refugee in Southern Sudan after her family escaped Uganda in the 1980s when the Idi Amin regime - in which her father was a soldier - was overthrown.

Life was grim living in the congested transit camps, with up to eight people living in a small hut.

There were open sewers and little shelter against the elements.

She awoke every morning with the desperate hope that agencies would be there with food and if it were not for them, she would not be here now.

Growing up surrounded by war and poverty, led her to pursue a career in humanitarian aid, so that she can give something back to the people who were left behind.

This programme follows Gemma back to Uganda where she spent so many of her formative years.

She visits camps, speaks to refugees and assesses their needs.

Gemma also revisits her old home and meets relatives to try and piece together how her family fared during those years of military upheaval.

First broadcast 22 May 2009

No Winner Seen in Somalia’s Battle With Chaos

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

No Winner Seen in Somalia’s Battle With Chaos
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: June 1, 2009
For actual New York Times article click HERE
NAIROBI, Kenya — Somalia is once again a raging battle zone, with jihadists pouring in from overseas, preparing for a final push to topple the transitional government.


Roberto Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A woman sat recently with her 7-year-old son, who had been wounded by a stray bullet, in a medical tent set up by Ugandan forces in Mogadishu, Somalia.

Roberto Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Through a car window, an intersection in a Mogadishu area noted for violence. The moderate government controls only a small part of the city.

The government is begging for help, saying that more peacekeepers, more money and more guns could turn the tide against the Islamist radicals.
But the reality may be uglier than either side is willing to admit: Somalia has become the war that nobody can win, at least not right now.

None of the factions — the moderate Islamist government, the radical Shabab militants, the Sufi clerics who control some parts of central Somalia, the clan militias who control others, the autonomous government of Somaliland in the northwest and the semiautonomous government of Puntland in the northeast — seem powerful enough, organized enough or popular enough to overpower the other contenders and end the violence that has killed thousands over the past two years.

Somalia analysts say the main event, the government versus the Shabab, will drag on for months, fueled by outside support on both sides. The United Nations and Western countries see the transitional government, however feeble, as their best bulwark against piracy and Islamist extremism in Somalia, and are pumping in hundreds of millions of dollars for the government’s security. At the same time, the Shabab are kept afloat by an influx of weapons and fighters, much of it reported to be flowing through neighboring Eritrea.

The Shabab, more than anyone else, have succeeded in internationalizing Somalia’s conflict and using their jihadist dreams to draw in foreign fighters from around the globe, including the United States. The Shabab, whose name means youth in Arabic, are a mostly under-40 militia who espouse the strict Wahhabi version of Islam and are guided, according to American diplomats, by another, better-known Wahhabi group: Al Qaeda.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the top United Nations envoy for Somalia, said that there were now several hundred foreign jihadists fighting for the Shabab. He noted that they were “more motivated, better organized and better trained” than typical Somali street fighters, who tend to be teenagers paid a few dollars a day to charge blindly into battle with rusty Kalashnikov rifles. These young combatants know as much about military tactics as they do about school, which is not a lot. Class has essentially been out for the past 18 years, since Somalia’s central government collapsed.

But the Shabab have limitations, too. In the past few weeks, the Shabab and their allies all but seized Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, and sealed the escape routes out of the city. In the end, though, they were unable to overrun those very last, but strategically vital, areas the government still controls, like the port, the airport and the hilltop presidential palace.
The new Shabab overseas recruits have imported to Somalia the tricks of Al Qaeda’s trade, like remote-controlled explosives and suicide bombs. But as Iraq and Sri Lanka have shown, insurgents need more than suicide bombs to take over a country. They need overwhelming force, or a persuasive ideology and governing strategy, all of which the Shabab currently lack. The only role that seems fit for them right now is that of spoiler.

“The Shabab can’t govern,” said Hassan Gabre, a retired engineer in Mogadishu. He said the Shabab were simply part of Somalia’s industry of violence, trying to defend “the anarchy regime.”

Shabab clerics are quick to put their austere version of Islam into effect in the territory they seize, recently amputating the hand of a convicted thief and then dangling the lifeless, bloody results in front of a shocked crowd in Kismayo, a port town in southern Somalia. But this may be just a gruesome side show.

Mr. Ould-Abdallah spoke of a “hidden agenda” and suggested that the real reason the Shabab and their allies were in control of Kismayo was a confluence of sinister business interests like gun-running, human smuggling and the underground charcoal trade.

“There’s an economic dimension here,” he said.

It was not always like this. The Shabab were a crucial part of a functioning mini-government in 2006, when an alliance of Islamic courts briefly controlled much of south-central Somalia. The Shabab’s controversial religious policies were tempered then by moderate Islamists, who delivered services like neighborhood clean-ups and community policing, and as a result the whole Islamic movement won grass-roots support. In the end, the experiment lasted only six months, until Ethiopian troops, backed by American military forces, invaded and drove the Islamists underground.

That intervention failed. The Islamists returned as a fearsome guerrilla force and the Ethiopians pulled out this January, setting Somalia more or less back to where it had been in 2006, with 17,000 people killed in the process (according to Somali human rights groups). Moderate Islamist leaders then took over the transitional government, nominally protected by 4,300 African Union peacekeepers.

But no one is especially well liked in Mogadishu these days, not even the peacekeepers, who may have the most dangerous peacekeeping mission of all. Many Somalis turned against them after a deadly episode in February when a roadside blast hit an African Union truck and the peacekeepers responded by firing wildly into a crowded street. According to Somali officials, the peacekeepers killed 39 civilians, though the African Union said that the true figure was much lower and that the people had died in a cross-fire. Radical Islamists are now calling the African troops “bacteria.”

All this could be an opportunity for the transitional government. After all, the new president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, rose to popularity as a neighborhood problem solver, best known for helping free kidnapped children.

But Sheik Sharif’s government seems hobbled by the same tired, intractable clan divisions and lack of skills that torpedoed the 14 previous transitional governments. There have been glimmers of hope, such as the government passing a national budget for the first time in years and using legitimate tax money from Mogadishu’s port to pay its soldiers. But the bigger picture is grim. In the past few weeks, it proved very difficult for the government even to organize its various militias to jointly defend the few blocks it still controls.

The pattern is clear, and may not be broken anytime soon: A weak government means more violence, means weaker government, which means still more violence, and so on.

“With all the fighting that’s going on, this government can’t attract the best Somalis,” said Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat in Kenya. “The good Somalis are not going to come when it’s so violent. Would you?”

Refugees from Iraq in new war

Friday, May 01, 2009

For full article and an audio clip, go here:  Refugees From Iraq In New War

Professionals expecting American dream fight nightmare of recession.
By Moni Basu

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

After surviving war, after seemingly unending days in squalid refugee camps, solace for the stateless lies in the journey to America. Smiles are reborn when the jet touches down in the land of opportunity.

Atlanta welcomes more than 2,000 refugees every year, many of whom are fleeing terror or have lived the bulk of their years without a homeland. But amid a severe recession in this country, the struggle to begin anew is greater than ever.

Expectations dashed and pocketbooks quickly emptied, jobless refugees are left to ponder whether the lives they left behind, though mired in fear, might have served them better.

“What do I have to expect? Being homeless? This is the United States. Life should be better than that,” says an angry Zainab Ibrahim, an accountant who fled to Jordan from her native Iraq and was resettled in Atlanta last June.

She came with hope, as did her compatriots Jabber Mohammed, Abdulkadir Ahmed and Imad Yakoub, middle-class professionals who expected to find suitable employment here.

Some aired their frustrations one April afternoon at the Decatur office of the International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit agency that resettles refugees. George Rupp, president and CEO of the global organization, was visiting the Atlanta office to hear from Iraqis like Ibrahim, now dependent on the generosity of friends and family to pay her bills.

Rupp says American resettlement agencies feel a moral responsibility for Iraqi refugees because of the 2003 invasion and subsequent U.S. involvement in Iraq. It took the United States several years to open its doors to Iraqis displaced in the war that began in 2003. It’s unfortunate, Rupp says, that when they finally began arriving in America, it was in the midst of an economic downturn.

Current joblessness among refugees is the worst ever in the 30-year institutional memory of the International Rescue Committee. Regional Director Ellen Beattie says the job placement rate in 2008 was 74 percent, a drop of 20 percent from the previous year. The first quarter of 2009 has been even more grim, especially for newly arrived Iraqis. Only 25 percent have a job after the first six months.

Job developers at the committee, many of whom were settled here as refugees themselves, try to assure the newcomers.

Naima Abdullahi pleads with the Iraqis: Don’t abandon the American dream.

She says her Ethiopian father earned a pittance working at a meat company 150 miles away when her family first arrived from Africa.

“I understand where you came from,” she says. “I have walked the same path. America is a great country. Anything is possible. But it’s up to you.”

Ibrahim remains unconvinced. She wants to know why anyone would want her to work as a maid when she is college educated.

“Don’t tell me to lower my expectations,” she says.

Others in the room are frustrated that they cannot find any job.

“Not even as a cashier,” says Abdulkadir Ahmed, who was a commercial aviation pilot in Iraq.

He blames the economy but ends his comments on a note of optimism.

“I think the situation will be solved soon because of [President Barack] Obama’s stimulus plan.”

Atlanta’s six resettlement agencies receive $450 per refugee from the federal government. Agency staffers find apartments for newcomers and pay the first month’s rent as well as a deposit on utilities, MARTA cards, furniture, clothing and food.

Sandra Mullins, director of World Relief in Atlanta, says the resources were already incredibly small —- $450 ran out fast and allowed little time for a person to learn English and the lay of an unfamiliar land.

But in more prosperous times, Mullins said it was still possible for refugee families to become self-sufficient within 120 days, after which agencies cut off assistance dollars.

These days, Mullins says it’s taking six months or longer. It used to take four or five applications to land a job. Now it’s more than 20.

Families are running out of money. So are the agencies, whose private donations from churches and communities have fallen by as much as 50 percent because no one has change to spare.

“We’re seeking emergency funding to prevent homelessness,” says Beattie of the International Rescue Committee.

She doesn’t know of a family who is on the streets yet, but is concerned about the high number of eviction notices. Refugees in Georgia are not immediately eligible for subsidized public housing, prompting some to migrate to states such as Maine where such housing is available.

The recession has hit in other ways as well.

Some big employers in the metro area that provided entry-level jobs attractive to the unskilled or non-English speakers have vanished, Beattie says. One was Wayne Farms LLC, a poultry processing plant in College Park that once employed 600 people. Service jobs, too, are disappearing.

Parangkush Subedi, who grew up in a Bhutanese refugee camp in Nepal, arrived in Atlanta with his wife and mother last July. By October, he had found a job at the Four Seasons Hotel as a server. Even though he has a master’s degree in food engineering, Subedi was happy to have a job earning $7.50 an hour so that he could buy groceries and pay his $600 a month rent in Clarkston.

The posh hotel is one of 30 or so businesses that the International Rescue Committee commends for hiring refugees. But with low occupancy, the hotel had to lay off Subedi. He has been unemployed since February.

Four Seasons also laid off Imad Yakoub, 54, a civil engineer from Iraq who worked as a steward. He is struggling to fend for his wife and three children and often reflects back on the five-bedroom house and once-comfortable life he left behind in Baghdad.

After his brother was kidnapped and killed —- his body was tossed out with garbage on the streets —- and his own life was threatened, Yakoub fled to Jordan and finally arrived in Atlanta in June 2008.

“We came with promises that we would be supported for eight months,” he says. “But we only got four months, which is a very short period. Then I worked for five months and did my best. I stood on my feet for a long time.”

For highly educated refugees, the road to assimilation has always been tough, even humiliating. Doctors who are forced to accept work as chicken packers. Professors who clean hotel rooms.

Underemployment is prevalent especially in the Iraqi refugee community, comprised of many middle-class professionals forced from their homeland by violence and intimidation.

Masooda Omar, a refugee from Afghanistan and a job developer for the International Rescue Committee, tells the panel gathered to hear Iraqi grievances that five years ago the agency would never have considered entry-level jobs for skilled workers. Now there is no choice.

Economic desperation surfaces at the meeting in Atlanta. Everyone in the room knows that sometimes it can manifest itself in extreme ways.

Earlier this month in Binghamton, N.Y., a laid-off Vietnamese immigrant still struggling to learn English killed 13 people at an employment center.

“With the Iraqis especially, there were already high levels of anxiety from years of violence and fragmentation of trust,” Beattie says. “All that is exacerbated.”

They might have escaped civil war, the Iraqis say. But they landed in a different war here in America.

RFS’s YouTube Debut

Thursday, April 23, 2009

I was abducted by the LRA

Monday, April 20, 2009

For original story, visit The Guardian Weekly HERE
Chased out of their native Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army has filtered west into Congo, where in the past two months they have killed 900 civilians and displaced another 150,000, according to the UN. They are notorious for the forced conscription of children as soldiers and sex slaves. One of these children was Richard Mitambwoko, 17, who was kidnapped from his school last year. He recounts what happened

Friday March 20th 2009
By Susan Schulman

‘They killed people who tried to escape,’ says Richard. Photograph: Susan Schulman

It was 7 September last year when the LRA came to our village. I lived in Duru, which is 90km from the town of Dungu in the north-eastern corner of Congo.

They came into our classroom and locked the doors behind them. I was in my second year of secondary school. There were 58 of us in the class – we were all terrified. We tried to escape through the windows, but the soldiers caught us and tied us up. It wasn’t just our class though, they did the same to the entire school.

Once we were all tied up they marched us to the home of a priest – he was an Italian priest – and forced us to steal everything from his house. Then, once we had taken all we could they marched us back to the road. From there we turned in the direction of the bush.

We walked and walked until it was dark, and at last arrived at a place where we could pass the night. We were separated, the young to the left, old to the right. Those of us who were young were between the ages of eight and 17, both boys and girls. We stayed outside while the older ones were taken to sleep inside a house.

In the morning the older ones were allowed to leave – but we weren’t. All of us children, even the smallest, were told to pick up the soldiers’ bags and equipment and keep walking. We continued all day until we reached a small village called Madore, where we spent the night.

The soldiers gave us water but no food. We were so hungry. There were about 100 of us, all young children and all crying; everyone was very scared.

The next day we continued until we reached another village. I think it was called Ganagabo. That was at the end of the third day. There, the soldiers presented us to their chief, Joseph Kony. He looked us over and authorised his soldiers to take us to the fields and guard us there. He said he would come later. 

When he came he divided us into groups, boys in one, girls in another. He then divided the boys again, making us stand in separate brigades. But the girls were taken away – even the very youngest – and given to the officers.

The groups of boys were sent to different locations. My brigade spent the night in a field that had the same name as the military base there. It was called Swahili, and it became our base.

Every day was the same. We left early, at the break of dawn. We worked in the fields until midday, when we had a two-hour break, and then we returned and worked until 6pm. We cultivated various crops – beans, sorghum and some others. They gave us water, but there were always a lot of guards around and they beat us to make us work quicker and harder. After work we would be sent to collect water for the officers. Then once we’d given it to them for their baths, we’d go back to where we slept. We were allowed to have baths too – twice a week if we were lucky.

Life went on like this, with hard work and beatings, until one day our camp was bombed. I don’t know exactly when it happened, as time in the bush is meaningless. After I returned to my family I found out that I had been in the bush for about four months, but other than that I have no sense of time passing.

When we were bombed I fled with a group of about 90 LRA soldiers. We spent a month in the bush, always fleeing the FARDC [Congolese military]. I didn’t try to escape the whole time I was with the LRA. I was terrified. They said they would kill anyone who tried to escape. I had seen it happen. People who had tried to flee had been killed right in front of my eyes.

Then one day the FARDC caught up with us and attacked us again. This time our group split up, fleeing in different directions. In my group there were four of us who had been kidnapped and two LRA soldiers. Every night at midnight the six of us would set out through the bush. We didn’t eat anything at all. This continued for four full days. We had no strength but we had no choice except to continue. I was very scared.

On the fourth day one of us said that if we had the chance we should try to escape the two soldiers. If we stayed we would die, but we knew that if we left we might die too. So, when the LRA soldier who came with us when we went to fetch the water went to relieve himself, we took a chance and fled as fast as we could into the bush. We had absolutely no idea where we were or which direction to go in. Another two days passed. We were still without food and we were running out of strength.

Then I remembered something my father had told me long ago. He said that if I was ever lost in the bush I should follow where the sun sets. So that’s what we did. And after two days we found a road at last.

We hadn’t eaten in six days, but we knew that at some point we were bound to find food. It was this knowledge that gave us strength to keep going. Finally, we came upon a field of sweet potatoes; we threw ourselves on it, digging furiously at the earth.

However, it was at that moment that the FARDC came by and saw us. They thought we were LRA. My friend wanted to flee but I said no, we should go to them and tell them we were hostages and we were Congolese.

So that’s what we did. We told the FARDC our story and they took us to the chief of their locality. We told him that we had been kidnapped on 7 September from the village of Duru. He said he would have to have our story confirmed – and if he found out it was a lie he would know we were spies and there would be trouble.

But they took us in and gave us food. Our stomachs had shrunk so much from not eating that we couldn’t eat very much. We spent five days at their base. When they found out our story was true they brought us to Coopi [an Italian NGO]. There they put us in touch with our families and at last, after four months, we were reunited with them.

Life with the LRA is not normal. What they do is use you to find other recruits, and when you come across them you have to hit them, you have to draw blood. This goes on all the time. It gets so that when they don’t kill you, you feel good. That’s how it works – you just want to feel good.

Also, whenever they feel like it, they melt plastic bottles and drip the plastic onto your skin. That’s what all these marks on my arms are from. They did it to me when we were in the bush; some of the others had tried to escape so they punished all of us.

I have no idea why the LRA are doing this. None at all. They are referred to as a Christian army, but there is no Christianity there. Anyone who says Joseph Kony and his soldiers are Christians is a liar. God doesn’t exist. If he did he wouldn’t let us be kidnapped, he wouldn’t let this happen.

Among the LRA soldiers there are young ones like me and older ones too. I talked a lot with those who were my age. They said they wanted to leave but had killed too many people for it to be possible. They said they would suffer too much if they left.

Most of the soldiers were Ugandans, they spoke Acholi. When we were first kidnapped there were some who spoke my Congolese dialect, Lingala, but little by little I learned to speak to them in Acholi.

We were obliged to be like them. We were in a military camp, and a military formation. We had to do what they did. One time when our friends fled into the bush, we had to go and trap them and hand them back to the LRA. They were killed in front of us, as an example.

I didn’t kill. Mostly I went into houses and robbed them, but my friends were forced to kill.

The whole time I was there I thought about nothing but death. I saw people being killed every day and I had to do such bad things all the time. I didn’t know if I would see my family again. The LRA had killed a lot of people when they attacked our village. They had stayed behind to burn it, too. I didn’t know if my family was alive.

Afterwards, reunited with my family, it was like a wake. Everyone was crying and crying and crying. I discovered that my 10-year-old sister had been taken, she had spent a month with them. My 13-year-old sister is still gone. There are still a lot of children in the bush with the soldiers.

I have nightmares all the time. I jump out of my sleep in fear, imagining the LRA are there and I have to go with them again.

New York Times Immigration Map

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Check out this map!  It shows how many immigrants and refugees are living in counties in the U.S.
New York Times Map

Somali Refugees: Camps in Crisis

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Before refugees are resettled, often times they live in deplorable conditions in refugee camps.  This video gives you a look into life at a refugee camp for displaced Somalis.

Rays of Hope for Darfur Refugees

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Rachel Andres is the director of a solar cooking project that has transformed the lives of women in the refugee camps of Chad and Darfur. Female refugees have been at high risk of rape and sexual violence as they foraged for firewood outside the camps, but the introduction of sun-powered cookers has reduced their need to burn traditional fires. Rachel is being awarded this year’s Charles Bronfman prize for her humanitarian work

Tuesday May 6th 2008
Original article found on the Guardian’s website HERE

Rachel with Zanuba, a woman from one of the refugee camps in Chad. Photograph: Toby Dershowitz
The solar cooking project began with Jewish World Watch (JWW), an organisation that was formed almost four years ago in Los Angeles with the aim of ensuring that no group anywhere in the world is ever again targeted for extinction without people of conscience rising up in protest.

Perhaps one of the reasons this resonates with me is because my grandmother’s family – 22 of them – were killed in Europe in the Holocaust. She survived – she had left Poland in 1919 to escape an arranged marriage and was in America when the war broke out. Being a strong-willed woman who didn’t want to marry who her parents had chosen for her actually saved her life.

I went to my synagogue to hear the co-founder and president of JWW speak about the situation in Darfur. And when I heard her speak I thought: “I’ve got to do something about this.”

In Darfur and neighbouring Chad, women and girls from the refugee camps are being attacked and raped as they go to forage for firewood. But without wood they can’t cook for their families. Out of all the refugees in the Darfur camps 80% are women and children. Most of the men have been killed.

JWW’s women’s committee discussed a variety of options, like providing rape crisis centres in the camps and sending over trauma and grief counsellors – very western ideas really. But we felt we had to something to help these women, who had little choice but to send their daughters off to find wood, risking assault and rape.

Then I heard about a small pilot project in one of the refugee camps, which used the sun’s rays to cook food. It meant that women wouldn’t have to leave the camp so often to find firewood. I hunted around and found the KoZon Foundation, a Dutch organisation that was to become our partner on the ground. Together we joined forces with Solar Cookers International, a US-based non-profit organisation that raises money for solar cookers.

The Iridimi camp in Chad has 17,000 refugees living in it, and we set a goal of giving everyone a solar cooker – two for each family, one to cook their rice or macaroni and the other to cook their sauce or make tea.

In the beginning it seemed like a lofty goal, but we were determined to achieve it. We have recently begun to expand the project to a second camp that houses 22,000 refugees. We have a small manufacturing plant there, where we employ women to manufacture cookers and train other women. The hope is that we’ll go into a third camp soon and then expand the project to many more camps housing the Darfur refugees. The scale of their need is massive.

The project has been funded by private donations. We figured out that it would only cost $30 to provide one family with two solar cookers, pot holders and training. The fundraising took on a life of its own. Once people started to hear about it they realised they could do something to help, that giving just $30 dollars could help a family survive.

We’ve raised over a $1m, but the majority of our donations have come in $30 increments. We had people all over the US raising money through car washes and bake sales. One girl started to paint rocks and sell them for a dollar each, and she has raised over $3,500.

Because the tragedy is so enormous in Darfur and Chad, people often feel powerless. They ask: “What can we really do?” But this project has shown them that there is something we can do. We may not be able to find the overall solution to the Darfur problem, but we can help protect the lives of women and girls until the world addresses the genocide going on there.

The solar cookers aren’t just about safety, they’re also better for the health of the refugees – women were suffering from lung and eye problems from bending over smokey fires for long periods of time. There’s an environmental advantage too. If Chad’s 250,000 refugees keep cutting down trees for firewood, estimates are that in two years there will be no wood left. The solar cookers decrease that need for wood.

When we visited Chad in October the women told us that they now have time to do things like attend to their children and take care of elderly relatives. Previously, they had had to trek for miles in the burning 100-degree sun to find firewood. As you can imagine, in a refugee camp with 17,000 people, they would have to go further away from the camp each time.

The cooker itself is very simple – it’s a piece of cardboard covered with foil, cut so that the angle of the sun’s rays can hit the foil and then hit a black pot underneath. The cooker is generally ready to within two hours – within 10 minutes the pot is hot to the touch.

It’s an odd process – every time I use the cooker I’m shocked it works. I think this was one of the reasons why other humanitarian groups didn’t get involved with solar cooking, because they thought the refugee women wouldn’t buy into it. This is a culture that for thousands of years has cooked on a three-stone fire. But the women couldn’t be more appreciative of the device.

When I found out I was being awarded the Charles Bronfman prize this year I was completely overwhelmed. The Bronfman family is a model of philanthropy and generosity for so many people around the world. Already, receiving the award has affected our work with the refugees; I’ve had so many calls from organisations interested in partnering with us. It has opened new doors and hopefully will enable us to expand to other camps faster. As the JWW tradition teaches us, “do not stand idly by”.

Just as I promised my grandmother I would bear witness and tell our family’s story, I promised the women of the Iridimi camp that I would bear witness to the stories of the 4669 refugee families. Nobody was there to save my grandmother’s family, but I hope I can help to ensure the safety of the families from Darfur.

• Rachel Andres was speaking to Anna Bruce-Lockhart.