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Bevat de naam: Ben Rawlence

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THE FORGOTTEN REFUGEE CAMP WHERE LIVES ARE LEFT IN LIMBO

Dadaab is the world’s largest refugee camp, but it lies forgotten in the scrublands of northern Kenya. It has roughly the same population as Leicester, some 500,000 people. Most have fled from neighbouring Somalia. But the Kenyan government has also placed people fleeing Sudan there, out of the way.

Author Ben Rawlence visited Dadaab with the NGO Human Rights Watch. He has built a powerful picture of life in the camp through exhaustive interviews with nine residents about their lives and their hopes. Tawane grew up in Dadaab, but is now a youth leader, taking risks for Western aid workers too scared to leave their compounds. Muna is a Somali woman who arrived at the camp as a baby. She is now under threat from her family for marrying a Sudanese man. Others have fled famine or more recent wars.

Rawlence says Dadaab is “the meeting point between two contradictory arcs of the twenty-first century: the rule of law that had spawned the international humanitarian system and…the chaos unleashed by the end of the colonial project to subjugate and carve up the globe.”

He shows how Kenya’s invasion of Somalia in 2011 was not the simple anti-terrorist manoeuvre it was presented as at the time. And it made the situation much worse for the refugees. The refugees are not allowed to work. But they cannot survive on United Nations rations alone, particularly as they have to constantly pay bribes to police and officials. So a vast and complex black market has grown up.

The refugees dream of being resettled in the West, as a tiny minority of others have been. Rawlence writes, “The young men and women at the youth centre were the ones left behind, who followed the progress of their friends abroad on Facebook.” They set the nightmare of their current lives in limbo against the risk and expense of trying to get to the West.

Ken Olende, Socialist Worker 2490, 9 February 2016
https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/city-of-thorns-the-forgotten-r...
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Gemarkeerd
KenOlende | 10 andere besprekingen | Feb 4, 2024 |
If you are feeling sanguine about the prospect of global climate change, this is a good book to dive into. Rawlence lays out the facts on the ground as he finds them on a globe-circling tour of where the forests stop in the Arctic and the tundra begins. He quotes both scientific experts he encounters in the field and the people who live in these remote areas as he focuses upon the predominant tree species in his sprawling travels. And he always keeps his narrative interesting.
[Audiobook note: The reader, Jamie Parker, does an astonishing job pronouncing botanical Latin names and a variety of indigenous languages. His reading is clear, precise, and well paced.]… (meer)
 
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Treebeard_404 | 2 andere besprekingen | Jan 23, 2024 |
Excerpt from a longer article:

Timely Take-aways for Life-long Learners: Trees and Forests
Whether exploring the impact of climate change or the restoration of forests, several new books examine individual trees, tree ecology, and forests of the world.

The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth
Ben Rawlence, Feb 2022, St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of Macmillan
Themes: Nature, Plants, Trees
Combining storytelling with science, Rawlence takes readers on a quest to learn about the impact of climate change on the trees of the boreal forest.
Take-aways: Use the locations described in the book to engage students in a discussion about the shifting treelines around the world.

...
Whether helping educators keep up-to-date in their subject-areas, promoting student reading in the content-areas, or simply encouraging nonfiction leisure reading, teacher librarians need to be aware of the best new titles across the curriculum and how to activate life-long learning. - Annette Lamb
… (meer)
 
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eduscapes | 2 andere besprekingen | Apr 11, 2023 |

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Werken
9
Leden
494
Populariteit
#50,038
Waardering
3.9
Besprekingen
16
ISBNs
37
Talen
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