Hospitality's ultimate test: In Pakistan, displaced seek shelter house by house

Photo: Matt Hackworth/CWS

MARDAN, Northwest Frontier Province, Pakistan -- Awalkhan has four spare rooms in his modest house, now a temporary hostel to 30 people.

“Because I had spare rooms, I host them,” Awalkhan said, sitting on the edge of a traditional rattan charpoy bed. “They have no other way.”

The people in Awalkhan’s home are like most in Pakistan who are displaced by the fighting between national army and Taliban forces. They left in a hurry, with little more than the clothes on their backs, and fled to the home of a relative or close friend.

United Nations figures document 1.7 million have fled escalating violence in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. That number is likely far below the total number of people affected because so many have found refuge in the homes of others. Read more »

Two U.S. students from Kenya keep refugees in mind

Photo: Erin Pence, Wittenberg University. Used with permission.

Two Kenyans who helped refugees in their home country have kept refugees in mind during their studies in the United States.

Harriet Kamakil was a casework assistant with the Church World Service-administered Overseas Processing Entity in Nairobi before obtaining a U.S. study visa with the help of former OPE head Lori Seymour. A political science major at Wittenberg University (class of 2010) in Springfield, Ohio, she has organized a campus-community toy drive to benefit children in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp.

“It’s a tough place for anybody to be, but especially for a child,” she said.  

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