Langlesing | Flyktninghjelpen

Langlesing

NORCAP expert Konstantinos Karagiannis is working with the Reception and Identification Service (RIS) in Greece, to make sure asylum seekers are properly registered and able to file their asylum claims from the new camp in Lesvos.

– Dette er nødhjelp, ikke en langsiktig løsning

Photo: Zaynab Mayladan/NRC

Eksplosjonen i Beirut:

– Katastrofer som dette kan få frem det verste i mennesker

– Hvis ikke viruset tar livet av oss, risikerer vi å dø av sult

David fled from South-Sudan ti Uganda in 2014. He completed high school at a local school in Uganda. He as now finished the online training course and a waiting for his enrolment at the University in Kampala. David is dreaming of doing an exchange year in either the United Kingdom or the United States. He want to pursue a carrier in software engineering to secure his future.

Only 3% of refugee youth have access to tertiary education, compared to 36% of the world’s youth. While a growing number of programmes provide tertiary education opportunities to refugees through scholarships and distance education these are few and with little documentation about processes and outcomes. The partnership between. Arizona State University (ASU) and Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) is a direct response to this need.

In August 2018, ASU and NRC signed a Memorandum of Understanding to establish an ASU Earned Admission programme at Ayilo and Nyumanzi refugee camps in Adjumani District, Uganda. The programme provides students with access to online courses through the university’s Global Freshman Academy.

25 South Sudanese and Ugandan learners participated in the programme. 40% are female and the makeup of the group otherwise reflects the importance of working hand-in-hand with the host community.

Location: Youth Center in Nyumanzi Settelment, Adjumani, Uganda
Photo: Ingrid Prestetun/NRC

– Vi er de som skal bygge opp landet vårt

NORCAP experts have helped set up the new camp on Moria, after fires destroyed the previous camp. We also have a site planner on the island, supporting coordination and setting up water tanks and sewage facilities. (Photo: NORCAP/Alkisti Mavraki) September 2020

Vi er på plass i Moria

Fled from South-Sudan in 2016. He lives in Uganda with his wife and 7 children. He started as a teacher in 2005 in South-Sudan.

Location: Youth Center in Nyumanzi Settelment, Adjumani, Uganda
Photo: Ingrid Prestetun/NRC

– Når jeg underviser føler jeg meg fri

Gleder seg over ny skole

Photo: Mahmoud Al-Filstini/NRC

Marwa Rasheed, aged 9, fled her home in Taiz and now lives in Al-Meshqafa camp with her family. “We have been living here for two years. We don’t go to school because of corona,” she says. “I’m trying to study at home until the end of the coronavirus' rules and then we can go back to school.”

Fryktens epidemi

Athieng fled from South-Sudan to Uganda in 2015 with her two brothers and mother, after first staying 2 years in Kenya. They live 25 km from the border to South-Sudan.

In Nyumanzi Settlement in Adjumani, Uganda Athieng gave birth to twin daughters in 2019 and her mother is taking care of them while Athieng is in school. Her father is still in South-Sudan.

Athieng is now attending last year of primary school in NRCs Accelerated Education Program. She and her 14 year old brother is attending the same class. AEP in Nyumanzi has more than 200 students from the age of 10 to 20 years. Athieng has a dream to become a nurse in the future.

Location: Youth Center in Nyumanzi Settlement, Adjumani District, Uganda
 Photo: Ingrid Prestetun/NRC

En dag i Athiengs liv

- Jeg var 13 og ble tvunget til å gifte meg

- De bombet skolen vår

Destroyed classroom

Ni utfordringer ungdommer i Syria møter

Hayat, 70, is one of thousands of people who were affected by the blast that damaged parts of their homes. She and her two sons with their families live in Karantina, XX km away from the explosion site. They live on different floors in the same three store-building. At the time of the explosion, she was sitting outside on terrace of the building’s rooftop.

“I was sitting on our terrace when the first explosion happened. I thought that airplanes were bombing,” says Hayat. “I immediately ran inside to get some of my key documents and my purse when the second explosion happened. It was so loud and it blew me off the ground.”

“I didn’t know what to do and my first thought was that my sons could not have survived this. Then, I saw my son, Giofar, coming up the stairs calling for me in panic to check if I was okay. The blood was dripping from his head and his body was full of glass shatter,” says Hayat.

“We have lived in this building for 27 years. I have witnessed all the wars and conflicts in Beirut but never have I seen Beirut so severely damaged as this,” says Hayat. “The scene outside our home looked like a battle field, beyond what you can comprehend. People were running around in panic, bodies on the ground, blood everywhere, buildings falling apart, cars under the rubble and glass shatter all over,” she says.

“There is a hospital opposite to where we live but it was totally destroyed and we were not able to move to take my son to the hospital. We lost him in the turmoil but a police officer had seen him injured and took him on his Vespa to a hospital about 15 km from where we live,” Hayat explains. “He came back fully stitched but we are lucky he survived,” she says.

“My other son’s wife was giving birth a few hours before the explosion, she delivered a baby boy. The hospital had to release her after just a few hours just to make space to other people who were heavily injured in the blast,” says Hayat.

“My grandchildren are all traumatized. They are afraid and can’t sleep during the night. Whenever they hear any loud sound they start screaming and fear another explosion will go off. We are constantly worried that something else will happen,” she says.

“We have a lot of needs now, the windows, curtains, and furniture are all damaged. The glass shatters destroyed everything and the walls have fallen down. My kitchen is not functioning and the water pipes are all broken. We need our homes to be repaired urgently but we can’t afford the repairs,” Hayat says. “We don’t know when we will get assistance but we need everyone’s help to rebuild the streets of Beirut,” she says.

“When I look at the destruction around us, I can only say we were saved by a miracle,” says Hayat. “In the end all the material damage can be replaced, we can eventually buy new ones but a life can’t be replaced,” she says.

“Imagine, one of the neighbours in the building next to ours is Syrian. He has been living alone for a while and his family in Syria. A few weeks ago, the situation where his wife and two daughters live in Syria worsened so he brought them here to be in safety and escape the war. But they didn’t escape death, the roof fell over them in the explosion and his wife and two daughters died. If you see him now, it’s like he has gone mad,” she says.

“My husband died when my children were very young and I raised them as a single mother. I put all my heart and effort to raise them and keep them safe. My biggest fear is to lose them now when they are adults. They are my whole life and if something happens to them I wouldn’t be able to handle it. The situation in country has become unbearable. Our hearts are broken, the people are tired and Lebanon has suffered enough,” Hayat concludes.

Photo: Racha El Daoi/NRC

Eksplosjonen i Beirut: “Det var et mirakel at vi overlevde”

Verdens humanitære dag

Møt hverdagsheltene i Flyktninghjelpen

Å undervise med kjærlighet

Children in Kongoussi Rural commune, Center North region, Burkina Faso, gather around a small radio to listen to a French lesson on spelling.

Photo: Adama KOURAOGO, Education Officer NRC Burkina

Slik sikrer vi utdanning til barn på flukt gjennom koronakrisen

10 grunner til at du bør hjelpe barn som Solantine (12)

Barn på flukt rammes hardest

Movses was at his house when the explosion happened, he ran to the balcony immediately when he heard the sound, the blast threw him, his wife and his 10-year-old daughter away. "When we regained consciousness, I didn't believe my eyes, everything was destroyed, it was like an atomic bomb", Movses explains, "I couldn't find a place to stay at with my family, so we are sleeping in our damaged house, what else can we do?" Volunteers helped Movses cleaning his apartment and giving assessment, "this is not enough, many people came and promised us help, but honestly, I don't see a point in that, this is hopeless. I want to leave this country, there's no hope for us to stay anymore. Do you want more than that?" Movses was injured on his head and all over his body. "My injuries weren't as painful as seeing my daughter covered in blood, I wasn't able to protect my own daughter." He concluded.

Photo: Zaynab Mayladan/NRC

Beirut: Eksplosjonen rystet livene deres

Photo: Racha El Daoi/NRC

Beirut: Hundretusener ble hjemløse på et øyeblikk

Ahmed Ali Muqbel Ali is a father of eight children. Formerly a stone-breaker, he and his family fled their village in Maqbana district in 2017. Ahmed Ali and his wife and eight children now live in a tent in Al-Malika camp in Taiz. He is jobless, and struggling to provide his family with enough food amid the spread of Covid-19 and an increasing lack of work.

In the last two months, he has seen the cost of flour go up by 40%, and other food prices rising too. “We are more scared of food prices than of corona.”

Ali is doing everything he can to ease the impact on his children, including dividing up one meal into three so they feel like they still are eating three meals. If there isn’t enough food, he gives it to the children and goes hungry himself. “There are times we only eat when necessary. The food for one meal, we divide it into three meals. We used to buy vegetables, fruits and other things but now we can’t. Two weeks ago, we went two days without any food.”

Photo: Khalid Al-Banna/NRC

Der grønnsaker er en luksus

June 25, 2020. Bogota, Colombia: Kendry Castro (23) is receiving the cash aid in the form of a card given to her by a worker from the NRC team after checking her documents. She has two children of one and three years. She came to Bogotá with them from Merida 6 months after her husband when he sent her the money for the trip and she finished her fifth grade of school. She had the dream of studying medicine but she had to leave it and go to her husband. In Merida, her husband had a motorcycle workshop. In Bogotá, he found a job in a fruit shop in the market place. But with the virus, he lost his job and now, he's out on the street looking for trash to sell for recycling. At this time, because the school is close, Kendry stays with her two children, she can’t work. Apart from the market given by the kindergarten, this is the first time they receive help, in 3 years of being in the country. "The other day at one point, I started crying, because I wanted to leave. I called my mother in Venezuela, I wanted to go, I did not want to be here. And she answered: "No! don't come! Look at the problems! Think of the children!" .
If she has to say something to the world about her life as a refugee: "It's hard. It's both sad and humiliating. Since I've been in Bogota, there are people who insult you. For being Venezuelan, they insult you. (...) There are many of us who wouldn't want this to happen to us. Because it's hard to come from a place where you are loved and cherished, to a place where you are humiliated, discriminated against, looked down on."
Her two children were born in Colombia, they are nationalized. And her husband is also Colombian: his parents were displaced by the internal war in Colombia and found refuge in Venezuela. Today, her grandmother has to return to Colombia. Kendry says, "My children's grandmother is Colombian. And she cries, and she says she wants to go to Venezuela, where she has her car, her house, her farm. Here, no. Here, she doesn't have it now." Credit: Nadège Mazars for NRC

Koronakrisens glemte ofre

June 19, 2020. Colombia: A group of Venezuelan is walking on the highway a few kilometers after Bogota. They are coming from Lima (Peru), from where they left a month ago. They are going to Valencia in Venezuela. They start walking in the morning at 6am and stop around 5pm. In the last few days, they are only 10 km a day because one of the women is 4 months pregnant. They wash themselves in the rivers they come across or in the petrol stations. Credit: Nadège Mazars for NRC

Den lange marsjen hjem

Korona i Sudan: Silvia valgte å bli igjen

Mobilen stoppet marerittene

Papiret som forandret Afrahs liv

Fuel and water crisis June 2020

Drivstoffkrise truer liv

Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) have been working around the clock to ensure that refugees and displaced children and youth can exercise their right to quality, relevant education.
Mohammad, 13, is one of these children. He is originally from Hama in Syria but fled to Lebanon together with his family six years ago. Now he lives with his parents, three sisters and three brothers in a small apartment outside Tripoli, North Lebanon.
“Although it has been six years since we arrived here, I still wish we can go back every single day. We could play football as much as we wanted in front of our home and we had a huge yard where no one bothered us,” says Mohammad. “In Lebanon we can never finish a football game, the neighbours always get annoyed and ask us to go back home. Now the situation is worse, we can’t do anything.”
Refugee children are bearing the blunt
When the activities stopped due to the Covid-19 outbreak Mohammad and his brothers were very upset. Going to the NRC learning centre, meeting their friends, and learning was part of their daily routines. “It’s not easy to stay at home, I feel down but there is nothing we can do,” says Mohammad with hesitation.
The Corona crisis has led to closed schools and disrupted the education to more than 1.5 billion learners. Refugees and displaced children and youth are bearing the blunt. Children and young people in displacement have often missed out on years of education already, due to war and conflict, and without any help, school closures due to Covid-19 will make them fall behind even further.
“To meet the needs of Mohammad and 1,200 other children enrolled at NRC learning centres in Lebanon we are now implementing remote learning modalities, including via communication platforms such as WhatsApp, combined with follow-up phone calls to provide guidance and support and to safely refer people to other specialised organisations,” says Rayan El Baf, one of NRC’s child protection technical officers in North Lebanon.
Due to the lockdown and fear of spreading the virus our colleagues are not able to visits the children and their parents. It is Mohammad’s mother, Fatima, that has sent us the photos, and it is our colleagues in Lebanon that have interviewed Mohammed and his mother.
“The remote learning has benefited my children a lot. Instead of leaving them behind during this period, NRC’s remote learning methods show us that NRC continues to care about the education of our children and appreciate their efforts to learn. It helps them connect with their inner selves, it gives them courage and strength to know their own worth,” says Fatima, Mohammad’s mother.
Nationwide lockdown

On the 15th of March, Lebanon declared a state of general mobilization in an attempt to control the spread of the coronavirus. With the nationwide lockdown, the basic survival and protection of the most vulnerable communities in Lebanon has become a critical issue. However, despite the challenges and to minimize the risk of exposure to beneficiaries and its frontline staff, NRC Lebanon continues its essential service delivery by only implementing critical lifesaving activities on-site and has tailored other programme interventions through different modalities to specifically support the national Covid-19 response.

Stay and deliver
“Although our learning centres were closed due to the Covid-19 situation, we never stopped delivering educational messages to the children,” says Rayan El Baf. “We regularly contacted them and their parents over the phone to check on their wellbeing, raise awareness on the situation and share learning materials,” she says.
Since the coronavirus lockdown, Mohammad spends most of his time at home. He either focuses on the NRC learning materials, revises the lessons, or plays with his siblings. He also sometimes helps his father at work, who sells coffee for a living.

Caring teachers

“My teacher Rouwayda always supports us to solve the exercise when we need help. She is caring and fair. Our teachers make us feel at ease and insist that we understand the lessons before leaving the classroom,” says Mohammad.

Mohammad’s mother is grateful for the support NRC gives her children. “They are always so happy when talking to the staff and are able to express themselves easily.”

“The remote teaching allows my children to revise and remember the information they received in the classes and bring some variety to the daily routine during the coronavirus lockdown. This is not only helping them to learn but also to feel more positive about the situation,” Fatima says. “The remote learning and support given over the regular calls also helps me to communicate better with my children”, she concludes.

New ways and solutions

“Though adopting remote learning modalities, we have been able to develop a positive bond between us and the parents are becoming more involved in their children’s education. Luckily, we have not faced any difficult issues with the remote learning, and we are always trying to find new ways and solutions to deal with any challenges that might arise. However, the hardest challenge is perhaps that we cannot answer the children when they ask us when they can come back to our centres to see us and their friends,” Rayan concludes.

“The learning centre was a place where I felt safe. I miss both my friends and the teachers. But most of all I would like to return to Syria,” Mohammad says.
Photo: Private

Mobiltelefonen ble redningen

Photo: Ingrid Prestetun/NRC

Flyktninghjelpen

Vi hjalp mer enn ni millioner mennesker på flukt i 2019

“Nothing is better than seeing my city clean.” Hisham Abdullah has been a cleaner for more than ten years, in his home city of Mocha. “I work every day from early in the morning until noon,” he says.

He is grateful for his job with the local council, which is the only source of income for his family of seven. But it is not an easy job, as there is a lot of physical effort needed to sweep the streets and heft heavy rubbish bags. And at times it is made harder by the attitudes of Hisham’s fellow residents.

“Sometimes we can face insulting remarks from people,” he admits.
Perhaps for this reason, Hisham has always appreciated those who have been supportive of his work, helping to clean outside their houses and shops. “When the community joins us in a cleaning campaign,” he explains, “it encourages us to work harder.”

But recently, Hisham has been aware of a shift in attitudes. Because on 10 April 2020, Yemen confirmed its first case of the novel coronavirus: Covid-19.

Before the conflict, Mocha was a small coastal city, known for its fishing—and also long ago as a major coffee port, after which the café mocha is named. But in the last three years it has become a destination for thousands of displaced families seeking safety from the conflict. This influx of people has meant an increased need for cleaning teams like Hisham’s.

“We clean all camps in the city and around it,” Hisham explains. “The displaced people appreciate our work, to be honest. Most of them collect their rubbish in plastic bags and put them in the in front of their tents.”

Not everyone was so supportive. But since Covid-19 has hit Yemen, people are taking cleaning more seriously. Even those who had previously been uncooperative now see hygiene as a priority.

“Everyone started to respect us and help us in cleaning their neighbourhoods,” Hisham says.

In the wake of the first confirmed case, Hisham’s team is one of many being supported by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) to step up their efforts to keep local markets and camps clean. This is part of a range of new measures NRC has rolled out to help combat the virus.

“Cleaning is not a new thing for us, we have been doing it for years,” Hisham says. “But the NRC training showed us how to work safely so we won’t be affected by the coronavirus or help spread it.”

Hisham was particularly glad of the protective equipment that came with the training. “NRC provided us with gloves, face masks and cleaning tools.”

“The happiest day for me,” Hisham says, “is when I see that Mocha is clean, and people are helpful and aware about the importance of cleaning.”

Photo: Zaid Al-Haimi/NRC

Kjemper for å holde gatene rene og fri for korona

Flyktningregnskapet

Korona og konflikt: en dødelig miks

Flyktningregnskapet

79,5 millioner på flukt i koronaens tid

Women from displaced families and host communities graduated from hairdressing and tailoring training in Ethiopia.

Neglisjerte kriser

Tre grunner til å beholde håpet

5 ting du bør vite om Kameruns tre kriser

Flyktningregnskapet

Verdens mest neglisjerte flyktningkriser i 2019

Date: 10 January 2020
Location: Barsalogho - Center North of Burkina Faso
Photo: Tom Peyre-Costa/NRC

Neglisjerte fluktkriser

Ti ting som rammer mennesker og samfunn når kriser neglisjeres