...Refugee Camps How To Fix...

Right now, there are 65.6 million people around the world who have been forcibly displaced. That’s roughly equivalent to the population of Britain. Of those, 22.5 million are refugees. Of those, less than 200,000 were resettled last year in another country. So what about the rest? Well, many of them are in camps. We think of the refugee camp as a temporary structure. A place of tents and well-meaning aid workers in white t-shirts handing out food and medicine. And at first, they can be. But as the weeks turn into months and the months into years and the years into decades, and refugees still can’t go home, they are left in limbo. The aid often dries up. The camps become dangerous. Solutions are thin on the ground.

In this week’s show, Steve Bloomfield and Stephanie Boland are joined by:

· Kilian Kleinschmidt, former director of the Zaatari refuge camp

· Ben Rawlence, author of City of Thorns



Get in touch
Steve: https://twitter.com/BloomfieldSJ
Steph: https://twitter.com/stephanieboland

Further reading

Here’s a review of Ben’s brilliant book, City of Thorns: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/books/review/city-of-thorns-by-ben-rawlence.html

Here’s a profile of Kilian Kleinschmidt from his time as the director of Zaatari: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/25/world/middleeast/kilian-kleinschmidt-calm-boss-at-center-of-a-syrian-refugee-camps-chaos.html