The Stanford students who made their way to the Bambasi refugee camp in remote western Ethiopia recently expected to see thousands of exhausted Sudanese refugees—
fleeing the fighting in their neighboring homeland—grimly lining up for handouts of food and water at U.N. distribution centers.
Instead, they found people like Sourke Damier, dressed in the same ragged clothes he was wearing when he crossed the border with his wife and three children, but eager to show off a small garden he was growing behind his mud-and-bamboo hut.
“I was surprised because his garden looked like an oasis in the middle of the desert,” says Jessica Miranda Garcia, a second-year master’s student in international policy studies. Damier was growing spinach, okra, onion and coriander in a so-called multistory garden to supplement rations from the World Food Program. Seeds are sprouted in burlap sacks filled with soil and rocks, using a vertical irrigation system that requires little water. The sprouts are then transplanted to a larger garden in the back of Damier’s compound, where he also grows carrots, eggplant and radishes.
Miranda Garcia is part of a yearlong collaboration between Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. A Law School class, Rethinking Refugee Communities, co-taught by CISAC co-director Tino Cuéllar and Leslie Witt of the Palo Alto innovation and design firm IDEO, pushed students to explore ways to better protect and support the more than 42 million refugees worldwide.
Miranda Garcia, fellow IPS graduate student Devorah West and seniors Ben Rudolph and Parth Bhakta—both computer science majors—were chosen by their classmates to represent them on the Ethiopia trip. They tested their prototypes for better camp communications and registration, as well as methods to bridge the gap between local communities and foreign refugees.
“Bambasi’s refugees had made gentlemen’s agreements with the host community to use their land, located next to a river, to farm,” Miranda Garcia said. “When they sell some of the vegetables at the local market, they’ll pay the Ethiopian farmers for letting them use their land.”
Giorgia Testolin, head of the World Food Program in Ethiopia, said refugees are forbidden from working in the camps, so food becomes their currency.
“In practice, this is your salary; it’s the only source of income,” she told the students during a briefing in Addis Ababa. Testolin said refugees typically sell 30 to 50 percent of their WFP food rations at the local markets so they can buy clothes, notebooks and pens for their children—or perhaps a bit of spice or music to remind them of home.
Beth Duff-Brown is communications and editorial manager at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.
