Rotary Peace Fellows are helping refugees start over.
Every 10 minutes, a baby is born without a state – without citizenship in any country. The crisis in Syria and conflicts in South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and many other nations are producing new generations of refugees, internally displaced persons, and asylum seekers. Increasingly, they are long-term exiles who are spending years, even decades, in makeshift refugee cities with their families, unable to return home.
The number of people forced from their homes by war and conflict has surpassed 50 million for the first time since the end of World War II, when the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was created.
Working to help this growing population of refugees – from those who are struggling in massive encampments in Africa and Southeast Asia, to people who have resettled in Europe and North America – are some of the graduates of the Rotary Peace Centers. (Nearly 900 Rotary Peace Fellows have graduated from the program since its inception in 2002.) These humanitarians are providing basic food and shelter, job training, education, and other support so the refugees can rebuild their lives.
Each year, Rotary Peace Centers host up to 100 peace fellows in a three-month program at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, or a master’s degree program at universities in Australia, England, Japan, Sweden, and the United States. Four alumni, who work for nongovernmental organizations and nonprofits that aid refugees, shared their stories with The Rotarian.
Noëlle DePape: From Lebanon to Canada
Noëlle DePape, who spent much of her 20s working overseas, including at a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, imagined becoming a globe-trotting emissary of goodwill after finishing her Rotary Peace Fellowship in 2005 at the University of Queensland, Australia. “I was trying to figure out how I could make the most impact as a peace-builder and as one who would fight for social justice,” DePape says.
Encouraged by Godfrey Mukalazi, a Rotary Peace Fellow from Uganda, she returned home to Winnipeg, Man., which has the largest urban indigenous population in Canada. “Go back home, where your power base lies,” he said, “and start to build peace there.” The arrival of transplants from Afghanistan, Bhutan, Iraq, Somalia, and other countries – about 15,000 immigrants each year in Manitoba, 10 percent of whom are refugees – created a combustible mix with an Aboriginal population facing struggles of its own.
DePape joined the staff of the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization of Manitoba, which operates a transitional housing complex and provides services such as counseling and after-school programs for at-risk youth.
“Some of our refugee youth were getting involved in gang life because they didn’t feel a sense of belonging in Canada,” says DePape, 35. The teenagers often had little education, so “they struggled in school with basic literacy in addition to refugee challenges,” she says. DePape notes that young newcomers could be quick to absorb prejudices held by some white Canadians against the indigenous population.
“Youth in Aboriginal gangs and in newly formed African gangs were butting heads,” she says. “There were a few knife fights and gunfights. We started to realize we needed to do preventive work and build relationships.” The Youth Peacebuilding Project, which DePape launched in 2008, featured a weeklong summer gathering for teens from indigenous, refugee, and suburban white communities. They swam and played basketball, but they also learned about other cultures and religions, observing Muslim prayers and a sweat lodge ceremony led by a tribal elder. “We also had intense dialogues about issues of identity and prejudice,” DePape says. Most important, the participants formed new friendships, she says: Teens would realize, for example, that “they both have single moms, they both hate chemistry – all those things that go beyond race,” she says.
The 67 families who live in the organization’s apartments – it will add another 60 units this year – are “incredible success stories,” she says. “They go on to buy homes, find stable jobs, go to university. They are so resilient and hopeful. It’s inspiring.”
Mahamoud Ahmad: From Somalia to Ethiopia
In 1988, when he was 10 years old, Mahamoud Ahmad fled his home during Somalia’s civil war. He and his family made their way to an encampment for internally displaced persons (IDPs) far from their village in the semiautonomous region of Somaliland. “We had to roast wheat – there was not enough water for it to be cooked,” he recalls. Because of the lack of food, “I have seen, as a child, people dying,” Ahmad says.
“Until the age of 14, I could not go to school,” he recalls. Once he could go to class, he seized every opportunity to learn. He finished 12 years of school in four years, studying from 6 in the morning until 6 at night. “Later, because I loved education, I spent 13 years attending four universities,” Ahmad says, fueled equally by sheer determination and by benefactors such as Rotary.
His education includes a master’s from the Rotary Peace Center at the University of Bradford, England, where he was in the class of 2008-10. As his understanding of peace and conflict deepened, his mission emerged: to help refugees overcome the problems he once endured. Ahmad traces the arc of his journey: “I have been a refugee, I have been an IDP, I have been a returnee.”
He applies that knowledge as education program coordinator for the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Ethiopia program. NRC camps in the Horn of Africa and Yemen sheltered more than 100,000 people in 2013. Every year, the organization also provides education and job training to thousands of refugees from Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan.
Ahmad recalls his recent work in Dimma, on the border of Ethiopia and the hot zone of South Sudan: “The fighting was horrible. You can be killed because you are with an NGO, because rebels think they can get something out of you. There are no facilities for the refugees or for yourself. I have contracted malaria, and my friends have been ambushed. The risks are countless.”
Working in the field, he has gone as many as eight months without seeing his wife and two young children. “You forget yourself,” he says. “When you finally take a leave, you feel like someone who has been in a grave but got out.”
Yet he is heartened by the difference his work can make, out of his base at the NRC camp in Dollo Ado, Ethiopia. There and at other council facilities, older youth learn skills such as electrical work, welding, and tailoring, and younger children receive basic education. The organization tracks graduates’ progress to ensure its programs are effective. Success “gives us energy to do more,” Ahmad says. “When you give refugees hope, by training them and giving them a skill and a chance to earn a living, they become people who can stand on their own.”
Langan Courtney: From the United States to Malaysia
As program coordinator of the International Rescue Committee’s Resettlement Support Center, Langan Courtney is based in the Malaysian megalopolis of Kuala Lumpur, which has one of the world’s largest urban refugee populations. The organization resettles about 10,000 refugees to the United States every year.
“The number of protracted conflicts around the world means that multiple generations are being born in refugee camps,” Courtney says. “There’s a growing number who are not going home and are not being offered integration” in the original host countries. Less than 1 percent of the world’s refugees make it to a third country, such as the United States, she adds.
“Millions of people are languishing in refugee camps. It’s difficult accepting that the need is far greater than the capacity to help, ” says Courtney, who studied at the Rotary Peace Center at Chulalongkorn University in 2012.
The stories of those who do manage to rebuild their lives in the West lend strength to Courtney, who cites the success of Yogeeta Gurung, a girl from Bhutan who lived in a refugee camp in Nepal. She resettled with her family in Oakland, Calif. “Less than a year later, she won the spelling bee in her district,” Courtney says.
Her experience as a Rotary Peace Fellow provided a lesson in examining crises from various perspectives, she says. “The peace fellowship is designed to bring people together from many professional backgrounds,” she notes, adding that the practical approach provided tools for diplomacy.
Backing down in the face of adversity is not an option, Courtney says: “A personal tragedy in my family shaped who I am. When I was 11, my house burned down in the middle of the night, leaving my dad and all three siblings dead, and my mom and me in critical condition physically and emotionally. At first I was angry that I was alive, then overwhelmed with guilt that I was alive – and eventually motivated to spend my time supporting others who were fighting to rebuild their lives in the face of great difficulty and loss.
“I do not equate my struggles to those of the refugees – I had a strong support structure in my life, a lot of fierce uncles and neighbors who came to the support of my mom and me,” she continues. “I also had a good education. But my journey does allow me to understand that happiness and hope are possible even if there’s a phase where hope seems lost,” Courtney says. “I don’t have any difficulty standing shoulder to shoulder with someone in need. That doesn’t make me uncomfortable. It has allowed me to do my job.”
Etsuko Teranishi: From Japan to Kenya
Etsuko Teranishi yearned for something different from the college scene in Osaka, Japan: She wanted to see the world and serve others along the way. During her third year, in 1998, she signed on to travel to Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, India. “I worked at the home for the dying and at the orphanage. I spent only a week, but I met many dedicated volunteers,” says Teranishi, 37.
That experience made her realize how lucky she was to have been born in Japan, she says, and inspired her to follow Mother Teresa’s example of serving the “poorest of the poor.” She went on to work in rural development for NGOs in Cambodia and Laos.
Teranishi, who studied at the Rotary Peace Center at the University of Queensland in 2005-07, is a project manager for the International Organization for Migration. She leads a crisis response unit in Nairobi, Kenya, which last year supported about 40,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia, and South Sudan, as well as Kenyans uprooted by conflict and natural disaster. “We help unemployed youth and victims of sexual and gender-based violence,” she says. Vocational skills and peace training are core elements of the effort.
“The needs are endless,” Teranishi says. “Even though we cannot supply everything, we listen to their demands. They are fighting to survive, but because their voice hasn’t been heard much, there is a lot of frustration and anger.’’
Based in Geneva, the IOM assists refugees worldwide who have been displaced by war and conflict, as well as environmental events. In late November, the organization agreed to partner with the Climate Vulnerable Forum. It involves 20 nations particularly susceptible to climate-related issues, including Bangladesh, Kiribati, and Maldives, which are in danger as the seas rise.
The IOM also helps victims of human trafficking, and estimates that as many as 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders every year. Working with the organization in Nepal, Teranishi helped groups of trafficked women by providing resources for small business start-ups, in partnership with NGOs and private institutes. When these women had returned home, “they were rejected by their families and community due to the stigma attached to human trafficking,” she says. “After they started their own business, they could earn income and continue their studies. Then they were accepted and reintegrated with their families.” — Brad Webber