By Cathy Watson | Senior Advisor
As summer bakes the Global North, life continues in our refugee area. We are so grateful for your support. This will be a short report.
We are conducting a survey to see how much our approaches have been taken up, and we have advanced plans for a young landscape architect from Kampala to sketch some of the exemplary refugee plots - exemplary in that they are demonstrations of the rich and multiple ways in which refugees deploy trees. We look forward to writing a bumper report on all this September. Take this as a holding report.
But we do have news. We may have finally obtained larger funding for a refugee project in multiple districts in Uganda. This is a deep joy to us.
Also, if you are hungry for information about how refugees live, and particuarly about all that they go through to obtain firewood, do look at the blog of Sarah Juster, the Fulbright awardee and Virginia Tech PhD student who interned with us for three months in 2022 and is now on her way to being a mega star in the field of trees in displacement settings.
In the past five months, she and her translators have walked 359 miles so far collecting firewood with 145 hosts and refugees!
"We are learning so much about the complicated social dynamics of firewood access," she writes. "Refugees on average travel 2.3 miles further than hosts to find safe firewood access. Participants have also identified 120+ edible, medicinal, and fiber species while collecting firewood in the bush."
Without your donations, Sarah would not have had a safe berth at a path-forging project where she could gain a foothold in a refugee settlement. Because of you, she found us and and we found her. That's just one thing we thank you for. Enjoy her latest blog here: https://www.refugeeshostsandtrees.com/post/stories-from-the-field-early-july
Look forward to sending you a bumper report in two months. Thanks for your generosity and patience!
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