this and that

The Next American City

Completely unrelated to Geneva, those of you interested in planning should check out TNAC if you haven't before. It's a great publication.
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I had the privilege of spending the day at a meeting of governments, NGOs and UNHCR, all groups concerned about resettlement of refugees. It was really interesting to learn about the ways that it is used as a durable solution to refugee crises (the other far-more-utilized strategies being voluntary repatriation and local integration). Did you know that over 12,000 Somali Bantus have been resettled in the U.S.?

Though it was the end of the day, and we were all pretty tired of sitting by that point, it was interesting to hear various presentations about resettlement of groups of refugees from one location at once. We heard about Ethiopians resettled in Australia, Liberians in Norway, Sudanese in Canada and Bantus in the U.S. It's interesting to hear about different methods that each country uses to process the refugees that enter and provide services to the populations. The challenges ranging from language to housing to job seeking definitely reminded me of my program coordination work at CAA.

I think one of the most compelling parts of the day was when a researcher from New South Wales discussed research about the terrible sexual and gender-based violence that some women in refugee camps face. She offered up a devastating case study of a woman who had repeated terrible experiences as an example of the incredible need for resettlement as an option for certain cases of the must vulnerable populations in refugee camps.

I will attend the meeting again for part of tomorrow before getting back to work looking at UNHCR's response to the tsunami disaster in Aceh province in Indonesia. It's interesting work to see what went well and where we can make recommendations to improve, so I've been quite busy with that (lots of time in front of a computer monitor though...)
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I'm able to access the keywords people use that end up on my blog. It's pretty funny what Yahoo! searches send people over here. Apparently only Yahoo! has indexed me...

The data for my recent searches (thanks to statcounter):

Num - % - Search Term
4 17.39% buy a pet penguin
4 17.39% penguin warehouse
3 13.04% linguistic movies
2 8.70% .penguin warehouse inc
2 8.70% shengen, switzerland
2 8.70% buy a penguin for a pet
1 4.35% penguin as a pet
1 4.35% photos of asian drag queens
1 4.35% conversational reading
1 4.35% opinion buy blue
1 4.35% gay zoo
1 4.35% penguin warehouse, inc.
23 100.00%
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Good night. I want to get a bit of work done here, then I'm braving the rain in Geneva. I'll throw together some dinner in my kitchenette (sad to only have 1 fully functioning burner and 1 that goes up to medium or so), then hopefully an early night.