RESPECT International Blog

What can I do to help refugees through RESPECT?

We have many opportunites for volunteers to help refugees. Examples include:

* Sign up students to participate in the Global Letter Exchange
* Write articles
* Hold fundraisers to support the Global Letter Exchange and other projects for refugee schools
* Tutor a class through RESPECT University
* Translate website content

We list our assignments on the United Nations Volunteer (UNV) website.

You can find our current opportunities by searching on the Opportunity Search page.

* Enter RESPECT into the Keyword field.
* Click on the Search button.
* Our opportunities will have Refugee Education Sponsorship Program listed under the Organization column.
* Select an assignment you find interesting.

Here it is the very First Issue of the Magazine edited by RESPECT REFUGEES International that includes the most important articles from the E-zines published in 2009 and the beginning of 2010.

Hope you will enjoy reading the magazine and you will share this with your friends.

We’s like to thank the Authors of this issue:

Shannon Alderman

Raja M Ali

Maria Brundin

Trish Harris

Kenneth Karest Lewela

Abby Jenkins Macedo

Paulo Muller

Laura Premoli

Mohammed Riazuddin

Suzan Salem

Linda Salim

Marc Schaeffer

Kirsty Semple

Uma Sharma

Olivia Wallace

Atuu Waonaje

Barny Whitwham

To Dowload this Issue, click here

[ http://issuu.com/enjoythemarket/docs/respect ]

by Giselle Trimmer

Close your eyes.

Now imagine you have escaped from the worst forms of violence, you live in the most precarious of conditions and you struggle to feed your family, day by day. Would you not welcome just about anything that would help make your life a bit easier?

For refugees around the globe, this extra help may be found in solar cookers.

How do they work?

It is easy. A solar cooker is a device that changes the light energy of the sun into heat energy to cook food. Although there are several different designs of solar cookers, the following three are the most common types:

Box cookers: These cook at moderate to high temperatures and often accommodate multiple pots. Worldwide, they are the most widespread. There are several hundred thousand in India alone.

Curved concentrator cookers or parabolics: These cook fast at high temperatures, but require frequent adjustment and supervision for safe operation. Several hundred thousand exist, mainly in China. They are especially useful for large-scale institutional cooking.

Panel cookers: Simple, cheap, effective – most panel cookers are just a packet of interconnected reflectors, incorporating elements of box and curved concentrator cookers. They unfold into a small bracket of reflectors around a central space where a cooking vessel sits in a transparent container of a heat resistant plastic.

The simple cooker works well and is one of the most popular solar cookers on the planet. Solar Cookers International’s CooKit is the most widely used.

Solar cooking can bring a number of benefits to refugee communities, including:

* Stimulating environmental sustainability by reducing the demand on forests, thus lessening the environmental impact on host communities.
* Reducing health hazards by diminishing the risk of contracting waterborne diseases, like diarrhea, and respiratory diseases due to the acrid smoke coming from cooking fires, subjecting refugees to levels that can be as much as 100 times above the international safety standards.
* Improving women’s conditions. A 2005 report by Doctors Without Borders found that 82 per cent of rape attacks occur when women are outside the populated villages, usually while searching for firewood. Furthermore, women and girls spend hours collecting firewood and then tending fires. Solar cookers require little attention, hence freeing time to pursue education, increase food production and generate income.

Many of the refugees who have used the solar cookers have spoken glowingly of their benefits, as carried in the Solar Cookers International, Solar Cooker Review. Here are some of their comments:

* “We keep clean, do not have tears in our eyes and have no running noses from smoke.”
* “We do not have to go and look for firewood in faraway places where we do not want to go (for safety reasons).”
* “There is no fire danger for our children or our tents.”
* “We can use the saved firewood collection time to do handiwork (for sale and buying extra food or milk), to be with our children, or to learn from the classes taught in the camp.”

Despite these touching testimonies, when it comes to implementing the new cooking technologies in a refugee situation, a number of drawbacks have been encountered.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in one of its reports identified some of the barriers to a sound implementation of solar cooking, by carrying out an analysis of pilot programmes in Pakistan which used the box cooker, Ethiopia where the CooKit was used, and Kenya, which used both types.

by Barney Whitwham

Refugee Stories, part of the Refugee Communities History Project (RCHP), recently announced a new online resource designed primarily to support Key Stage 3 Citizenship learning.

This is one of a number of Learning Resources created by the RCHP, which was established to record previously untold stories of refugees who have settled in London since the 1951 United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees, to highlight the enormous contributions the refugees make to the city.

Designed to develop an understanding and raise awareness of refugee issues among pupils, the content of this new Learning Resource is free to download and can be easily customised to suit the needs of specific classes.

The specific aims are to:

* challenge pupils’ personal views and feelings about refugees and asylum seekers;
* develop pupils’ knowledge and understanding of the reasons why refugees have been forced to leave their countries of origin;
* counteract inaccuracies and negative stereotypes in some media reporting of refugees in the United Kingdom;
* raise pupils’ awareness of the valuable contributions refugees make to their host countries – politically, economically, culturally and socially;
* develop pupils’ understanding that, above all, refugees are individuals, just like themselves.

The content is provided in the format of five individual lessons, with a range of supporting materials to suit mixed abilities. Each lesson can be easily adapted, and include suggested homework and follow-up activities.

The support materials are varied and engaging, and include information cards, quizzes, maps, video clips and PowerPoint presentations. While aimed at KS3 Citizenship, there is great scope for linking to other areas of the curriculum, particularly History, Geography and English.

The material is provided through Refugee Stories collected by the RCHP. The Project is run by the Evelyn Oldfield Unit as a partnership and is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the City Parochial Foundation, through the Trust for London.

The bulk of this work took place between June 2004 and April 2007 and, in 2006, the project won the 2006 Charity Award for arts, culture and heritage.

Over 150 people took part, from 15 refugee groups. It is from this wealth of information that the Learning Resources have been developed.

With asylum and immigration remaining a divisive political issue, particularly in the run-up to a General Election, it is pleasing to see high quality teaching material available to provide a much greater understanding of the subject for a younger generation.

Refugees are people who flee their country because of a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership of a particular political group. A refugee either cannot return home, or is afraid to do so.

Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) have been forced to flee their homes because of war or dangers. Unlike refugees, they remain in their own country. There are no specific international human rights laws to protect IDPs.

Every day, people become refugees to escape persecution or war. The persecution can be in the form of physical violence, harassment and wrongful arrest, or threats to their or their family’s lives. Exposed to danger if they remain in their own countries, refugees may have to face and survive mistreatment during their flight. Further danger may await them on arrival in the country of asylum. Teenagers are among the most vulnerable in any refugee population to the effects of violence.

Further information about refugees can be found on the United Nations High Commisioner for Refugees (UNHCR) website.
Refugee Education

Many potential volunteers may enquire where the scientific proof of effectiveness for the provision of remote education to refugees is. Most services these days are evaluated, piloted, and monitored formally in order to justify their existence. Furthermore, sustainability is a keyword for those who work in developing countries.

According to the UNHCR education is increasingly viewed as the “fourth pillar” or the “central pillar” of humanitarian response, alongside the pillars of nourishment, shelter and health services. The sudden and often violent onset of emergencies, the disruption of families and community structures deeply affect the physical and psychological wellbeing of refugee children. Education provides opportunities for students, their families and communities to begin, develop and maintain the trauma healing process and normalcy, and to learn the skills and values needed for a more peaceful future and better governance at local and national levels.

The restoration of education brings its widely recognized benefits – such as a contribution to productivity and economic development. It can also contribute to social stability by engaging young people in sustained constructive activity and self-development. There are also long-term implications for social cohesion: it is undesirable for one group of the population to be severely under-educated relative to other groups, especially where there is an ethnic dimension.

Schooling for girls leads to lower child and maternal mortality rates and increased female participation in economic and political decision-making. UNHCR worker Jacinta Goveas commented that children serve as a “release mechanism” for adults’ feelings of anger and hatred and that the adults’ conscious or unconscious indoctrination of children may lead to renewal of conflict in the next generation. She noted that children were taught songs about blood and revenge – but that given other subjects, they – and their teachers – responded favorably.

It is stated that where crisis arises due to ethnic conflict, it is crucial for humanitarian agencies to participate in the emergency education process rather than leaving it only to the community. Otherwise, local schools (possibly reflecting one side of the conflict) may become channels for transmitting hatred to the next generation, leading to additional crises in the future. Schools – and education in general – represent a mechanism to get “survival messages” to the community, in particular for adolescents, who may otherwise be prone to engage in militia training and other antisocial activities, or to suffer depression.

To find out more of take part visit us here: http://university.respectrefugees.org/