World Refugee Day

Today is World Refugee Day - to mark the occasion, The Niapele Project is holding events in Los Angeles, Paris and Buffalo (NY).

My life was completely turned upside down (in a good way) when I began working with refugees - their courage, resilience and complete generosity, in the face of the tremendous hardship they face on so many levels was a true lesson in "humanity", for lack of a better word.

On a broader level, I think it is high time we begin to pay more attention to the plight of displaced people around the world - there are more than 65 million people who have been displaced as a result of war, natural disasters, violence or other man-made catastrophes. Not even half of them fall under the mandate of the only international agency that protects and assists them, the UNHCR.

For more on this, please read my guest post chez The Global Buzz - thank you, Matt Stone, for the kind invitation.


A few WRD relevant links:

A Refugee's Story: A Liberian in Ghana (via Kevin Hill, Talkaloti)

A message from Antonio Guterres for World Refugee Day:




UNHCR 2007 Global Trends


The Niapele Project PSA - in partnership with Ayoka Productions



The Plight of Liberian Refugees in Ghana

World Refugee Day - June 20 2008

You can read my guest blog post for World Refugee Day @ The Global Buzz tomorrow, June 20. Above is a Wordle preview of what I will talk about.

Fix your Conflicts

You can listen to my first ever radio interview here - had I known this would be completely unedited, I would have probably been better prepared. Nonetheless, it was a great experience, and the host, Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker, is a very interesting guy - I hope I get invited back!
In any case here it is: Penelope Chester on Fix your Conflicts, June 16th 2008

(scroll down the content library, it's the first item in the archive)

Mind the Gap!

The internet is truly a wonderful place - this tool, GapMinder, is hard to describe - you just have to check it out. If you're even remotely nerdy, this will bring you hours of fun and distraction.

Some tidbits:

- In 2003, only 13% of adult females in Burkina Faso were literate
- In the same year, Koweit was at 84%.

- In 2003, the income share held by the lowest 20% of the population was 3.8% in Peru, 6% in Nepal, 9.3% in Pakistan, 6.5% in Sierra Leone and 2.6% in Brazil.

Love it!

Will This Ever Change?

Imagine if your sister, friend - or yourself - had to give birth in these conditions.

I witness many things in this clinic. What makes me sad is when a baby dies during birth.

Then the family gathers in the clinic and they ask me to take the baby to the grave. The family will be very upset - usually they are crying.

It is not the custom for many people to follow a baby to the grave.

So usually they will stay here and I will wrap the baby in cloth and put it in a cardboard box.

Frightening, but unfortunately, a reality for millions upon millions of people.

Relax

There is a trend in US conservative media to see terrorism everywhere - most recently, E.D. Hill, on Fox News, called the fist pound Barack and Michelle Obama shared "A terrorist fist jab" - come again?! Thankfully, FOX gave her the boot - but this is yet another attempt to point out how evil terrorists are taking over American society, and it's simply ridiculous. It's the same ridiculousness that has led wayyy too many people to actually believe that Obama is Muslim (in the US, this is still considered a flaw - and, unfortunately, not just for presidential candidates)

Reminds me of the recent absolutely inane uproar over the "hate couture" scarf that "terrorist loving" Rachael Ray sported in a Dunkin Donuts ad. It's a paisley scarf.... Read here and here for thoughtful commentary on this "controversy" - and read here to see the insane reactions that The Scarf prompted in the conservative blogosphere.

Climate Change in Africa

I just skimmed through this 400 page study on the changing environmental landscape in Africa - it's a truly remarkable report, that discusses everything from water resources, to the presence of phytoplankton along the coasts, to deforestation, arable land and urbanization, and provides a country-by-country analysis of the state of the environment on the continent.

400 pages is pretty long, but the press release is a good place to start and acts as an executive summary.

Interestingly, it had a section on the environmental impact and implications of refugee crises

Political conflicts tragically destroy lives and livelihoods. They also have adverse impacts on surrounding environments and signifi cant transboundary implications. Wars can destroy croplands, forests, waterways and their sources, and other natural resources, while refugees searching for safe havens can burden ecosystems and complicate environmental decision-making (Vanasselt 2003). The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that there were 2.4 million refugees in Africa at the end of 2006 (UNHCR 2006a). Environmental degradation can exacerbate conflict, which causes further environmental degradation, creating a vicious cycle of environmental decline, tense competition for diminishing resources, increased hostility, inter-communal fighting, and ultimately social and political breakdown. Ecological warning signs related to confl ict and its impacts include limited habitable space, decrease in production of goods, and a heavy human “footprint” (Wolf 2007).

They also have a map that accompanies this paragraph, showing the location of refugee camps around the continent. You'll notice that almost every country on the continent is home to a refugee population - and, as events in South Africa and Ghana have demonstrated recently - these uprooted communities tend to be catalysts of instability. Refugee and IDP camps in the Eastern DRC are known to have harbored Hutu rebels since the genocide in Rwanda, prompting international aid agencies to pull out or minimize their assistance - which means, among other things, that these communities need to live as scavengers in their environments.

As the paragraph above rightly notes, we are going to start seeing a lot more displacement due to natural causes, to environmental destruction - recently, events in Myanmar and China demonstrated this. The conflict in Sudan is in part due to a fight over the availability and sharing of natural resources, which are less abundant than they used to be. As a result, even if conflicts on the African continent tend to be diminishing, as this report highlights, we may see a shift in the causes that create refugee situations, particularly as the natural environment becomes further depleted.

In Guinea, the environmental consequences of population movements are of frightening proportions:

Less than one-third of Guinea is now forested,reflecting many decades of uncontrolled deforestation. The primary drivers include growing demand for agricultural land and dependence on wood and charcoal for 90 per cent of all energy needs. The humid tropical forests of southeast Guinea have been reduced to less than five per cent of their original extent (CBD 2002). This is in part due to an influx of at least 600 000 refugees from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d’Ivoire during the past 15 years, which has placed increased demand on forest resources. Refugees have expanded the local populations by as much as 40 per cent in some areas, resulting in local population densities close to 400 people per square kilometre (CBD 2002).

Overall, the report is slightly frightening. I encourage you to check out the amazing "before and after" satellite photos, which couldn't be more clear in showing the high level and incredible pace of environmental destruction. The drying up of Lake Chad, a vital source of fresh water for the Sahel region, is testament to this.

Lake Chad, 1972

1987...and 2007

I really recommend checking out their satellite image gallery, which provides a vivid and thorough overview of environmental modifications on the continent in the last forty years or so. The images showing how the Catoca Mine has been exploited in Angola between 1990 and 2006 is another example (page 104 of the study)

It is encouraging, however, that this report was published, and that light is being shed on this issue. When it comes to socio-economic development, it is now absolutely clear that environmental constraints will have to be mainstreamed into development strategies if those are to be sustainable.

Urban planning for the other bottom billion?

From the New York Times Magazine (courtesy of IHT), an interesting piece about the billion people across the world who are homeless -

There are 80,000 people living on top of a garbage dump in Manila; a population of indeterminate size - perhaps as many as a million - who sleep every night in the cemeteries of Cairo; homeless encampments in San Francisco, Atlanta and Houston; guest workers camped beside the towers of the Persian Gulf; migrant workers in the San Fernando Valley. They are all displaced people.

The article begins with a discussion about the type of shelter provided for refugees - blocks, sectors of simple tarp tents which make up refugee camps as we imagine them to be.

Rwandan refugee camp in the DRC

There definitely is a huge, huge housing problem globally - unfortunately, refugees aren't the only ones living in that sort of unbelievably precarious shelter. In Paris, where I live, there are lots of homeless people living in tents handed out by Medecins du Monde and the Red Cross. When I was an MA student at Sciences Po, I remember getting worked up after seeing those tents for the first time - it made me wonder "why am I so worried about people in places I've never seen, when there are needs right here, literally at my door step?"

Medecins du Monde tents in Paris

But I digress....

Pertaining to refugees, I wanted to - again - mention that all refugee crises are not the same. In fact, I'd say that the refugees I work with in Buduburam are probably better off (in terms of housing) than homeless people in Paris. They have solid houses, with sometimes more than one room, painted in bright colors - this gives the camp this incredible quality, where you could almost be lead to believe that things are ok for the community (not so, for reasons which I have written about extensively on this blog)

Buduburam Refugee Settlement

It seems to me that the housing/shelter issue is merely a symptom of a denial of basic human rights which knows no boundaries. Recently, groups in France have called for decisive action on the part of the government to deal with the sister issues of homelessness and precarious housing. Unfortunately, there are still dozens of thousands of people living in the most, well, disgusting housing in France, even in the very heart of Paris. And these people aren't all immigrants, in case that thought popped into your mind.....

Paul Collier's book, "The Bottom Billion", which has been discussed more than extensively in the blogosphere, talks about the plight of those living in those countries who have missed the industrial revolution and globalization gravy trains.

But is there another "Bottom Billion", spread out all over the world, whose most basic human rights are nowhere near respected? Geography, and a country's GDP, hardly matter for these people who are the face of inequality created by globalization.

Article 25, 1951 Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Sounds good, right? This begs the question: Is the IDHR the least respected international treaty in History?

Sustaina-what?

The online thesaurus I use does not have a synonym for sustainability. Is there only one word in the English language to express this concept?

When you "google image" sustainability, you get quite random things, such as
Readers, any thoughts?