While our Emergency Response Team is there to help people survive an immediate humanitarian crisis, the rest of our work focuses on assisting refugees build a new life. Here are just a few examples of how we are helping people to start again.

In this issue, we focus on UNHCR's successful activities in the following 3 countries: Uganda, Afghanistan, and Viet Nam.

Mary Taly has a job. Having recently returned home from an overcrowded camp for internally displaced people in northern Uganda, she is now part of a 350-strong group of local people building a road that will link her village to the wider world. “Without this road,” says Mary, “I would not be able to get to the health centre that can save the lives of my children, and it would also be difficult to reach the market where we can trade and earn a living.” The work to convert a narrow footpath into a 3.4km road is being funded by the UN Refugee Agency and the World Food Programme, to help people feel returning home is viable. Mary is being paid in food for her family, and tools for cultivating her land.
Read the full story on the UNHCR International site.

Pasta in Afghanistan? There is now. And because it is cheaper than rice and cooks faster, it is becoming popular. This is good news to vulnerable refugee women, such as widows with children, who have come home to Afghanistan with no obvious way of earning a living, and so have been offered a pasta-making course funded by the UN Refugee Agency. “We produce about 3kg of pasta a day,” says Shaujan, one of 80 people who took the course. “Demand varies, but at least it helps us to buy food for the children.” Some women have clubbed together to buy ingredients and market their products. “The more we sell, the more we can produce, the more money we can make,” says one. “Before, we were sitting at home doing nothing. Now, thanks to UNHCR, at least we have some income.” Read the full story on the UNHCR International site

You can’t miss it. The new two-storey school built by the UN Refugee Agency for children in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam is eye-popping pink. The playground isn’t finished yet, but already it is full of children more used to corrugated iron roofs, broken windows and thatched walls. As headmaster, Vu Cong Dong says, “It’s easier to learn in a school like this because the children can focus.” It is part of an initiative to welcome Montagnard hill tribe people back to Viet Nam from Cambodia. They had fled there after their protests about land confiscation and religious persecution were met with a violent crackdown by Vietnanese security forces. Other improvements to the area – vital in encouraging people to stay – include three new health clinics created and equipped by UNHCR. Read the full story on the UNHCR International site.