Mako, a young 23-year-old Ethiopian refugee, begins to tell her story. Her back is straight, her hands are folded in her lap, and she looks directly at our RefugePoint Protection Officer. Her voice is strong. She doesn’t shake or pause like others in the past. In fact, Mako draws her chair closer to the desk, …
Fadumo and her children rarely slept consecutively in the same place while fleeing her war torn country – and sometimes not even inside. Motivated by a genuine fear that government agents from her former country continued to pursue her, the family slept on the floors of other refugees’ apartments, in abandoned buildings and on the …
The RefugePoint conference room is a brightly lit space where sun pours in from two sides and a circle of fifteen chairs can fit comfortably. Coffee mugs and tea line the back table while RefugePoint Counselors Lonah and Clotilda finalize the agenda on the front white board and then wait quietly for their fourteen guests …
Sahra leans across the arm rest and whispers that she does not want her face shown in the photo, but that she very much wants to share her story. In fact, she hopes when her daughters graduate from high school to write a book about their harrowing journey from Somalia to Norway ten years ago …
Vancouver-based radio station CKNW interviews RefugePoint about the current famine in East Africa and how people can help. To hear the interview with Executive Director Sasha Chanoff and field-based Protection Officer Megan DaPisa, listen here.
New York Times Magazine 2011: New York Times Magazine follows a RefugePoint social worker on food distribution day, part of our life-saving urban refugee protection program. A protracted famine in Somalia continues to displace hundreds of thousands of people from their homeland. Hungry and desperate, Somalis appeal for help from humanitarian organizations in refugee camps and urban …
After one and a half years in the making, the fruits of an important project that RefugePoint has been involved in have now been released on the UN Refugee Agency’s website. RefugePoint was one of the driving forces and authors behind the new UNHCR-NGO Toolkit for Practical Cooperation on Resettlement. The idea for the Toolkit …
One of the most significant challenges refugees face is insecurity. After fleeing violence in their home countries, refugees often arrive to a country of asylum and continue to deal with issues of safety. They might not have any documentation, they might be alone and often they do not speak the language. These challenges put them …
ABC World News 2010: ABC World News covers the resettlement of one Darfuri refugee family that RefugePoint (then Mapendo International) helped. Lana and Munawar Kabashi of Darfur remember the killers — Arab militias called the Janjaweed — riding into their village on horseback and shooting, burning, and destroying the homes and massacring the villagers. In the …
Hassan is an educated man, speaks fluent English, has a university degree and is enthusiastic to do any type of work that he can find. Living in Kenya as a refugee, however, he has been unable to support his family and, given the lack of security in his country, he cannot return home to Sudan. …
