Arriving

I landed in Kigali at 1am this morning after having spent the past two weeks in Greece on the HKS Refugee Policy and Advocacy Trek. My head is still trying to make sense of everything we saw, especially the lack of coordination between different actors, the heart-wrenching stories of people whose lives are in limbo, and the vast challenges to move from a crisis response to a sustained effort for integration.

But before having the chance to reflect, I now need to prepare for my first day here with WFP tomorrow. One statistic I read in the book Refuge (which I highly recommend) seems to bridge the transition for me: for every $135 spent on one refugee in Europe, just $1 is spent on refugees elsewhere. Those I saw in Greece seemed to be the most marginalized and vulnerable populations I had seen--escaping war, a treacherous journey, and now simply waiting to see whether they will be returned or have the "opportunity" to try to make it on their own in Greece (which isn't ultimately where any of them want to be, and where the overall unemployment rate is 25%). Yet we spend the same on one of them as on 135 refugees here. That doesn't bode well for the refugee camps I'll be working in here.