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 2 countries: Somalia, and Afghanistan.

Fifty displaced Somali women have new hope as they launch their small transport businesses with a donkey and cart supplied by UNHCR. Habey Edin Mohamed is one of the donkey entrepreneurs. She was pregnant with triplets when she fled her village because of violent conflicts over scarce water. She and her family were starving, even though she earned a little money fetching firewood outside the camp. Now she uses the donkey and cart to bring water to sell to other displaced people and to offer a low-cost transport service in the camp. She earns enough to feed her children and hopes it will be enough to send them to school.
Read the full story on the UNHCR International site.

The ethnic Turkmen of Afghanistan are a nomadic, desert-dwelling people, who are returning to their villages in Afghanistan after thirty years of exile in Pakistan. Weaving carpets is the traditional activity of Turkmen women, while the men make the looms. Seventy-year-old Naseema weaves at a loom that she has set up in half of her UNHCR-supplied shelter. A carpet which takes her two months to weave sells for $10, but she says she will keep this one to make her own shelter more comfortable. UNHCR provides shelter, education and livelihood support to refugees like Naseema to help them reintegrate when they return home.
Read the full story on the UNHCR International site.