CISAC's Drew Endy has been honored at the White House as a "Champion of Change." The award is given to experts and researchers who promote the use of open scientific data and publications for the benefit of humanity. Endy was recognized for his trailblazing work as an advocate of public domain biotechnology.

HOMOSHA, ETHIOPIA - Mohammed Musa, the leader of a small village in western Ethiopia, says hundreds of refugees have crept into his village of 150 mud-and-bamboo huts to steal their goats and chickens. And cut down their trees.

The 33-year-old father of six feels for the thousands of Sudanese who have fled years of fighting in their homeland. But the Ethiopian tradition of opening its arms to African neighbors only extends so far.  

“Regardless of the support from our community, they are very aggressive,” Musa tells Stanford student Devorah West, the two sitting on a rattan mat beneath a mango tree, as donkeys bray and children gather to observe the foreigners.

“They have had such a heavy impact on the environment,” Musa says of the 9,400 refugees, rubbing the deep vertical tribal scars on his cheeks; marks of strength and courage. “They keep extending the camp and taking the land from us.”

And cutting down the trees: coffee, acacia, mango and eucalyptus.

West traveled to the western border of Ethiopia to talk to refugees and villagers on the outskirts of the refugee camps about how the two communities might work and learn together in vocational centers and schools between their camps and villages.

She came away dogged by one word.

“Firewood,” she says. “The bane of every conversation on this trip.”

West, a master’s student in international policy studies, traveled to the camps on a research trip for the Stanford Law School class, “Rethinking Refugee Communities.”

“Our project is aimed at really transforming the perceptions of refugees and trying to highlight the benefits of a shared community,” West says. “And not addressing the conflict over firewood I think could be a real weakness in our project.”

She learned women favor firewood over any other fuel as it complements centuries of traditional home cooking. Men see it as a commodity they don’t want to give away or, if they’re refugees, can’t pay for. The dispute over firewood led to the arrests of refugees outside one of the camps West visited; it has led to the rapes of thousands of women and girls across the continent as they stray from camps to look for wood.

“While the communities did by and large get along, tension was definitely created around the issue of firewood,” she says. “Firewood. Firewood. Firewood. This constantly came up in conversations with refugees, the host community, the local administrations and the Ethiopian government.”

So it’s back to the white boards, West says, where her team would now incorporate the firewood conundrum into the brainstorming about shared places.

Firewood. The bane of every conversation."

Stanford-UN collaboration

West, another second-year IPS student and two computer science undergrads spent 10 days in the Horn of Africa country in March as part of a collaboration between Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Their class was co-taught by law professor and CISAC co-director Tino Cuéllar and Leslie Witt of the Palo Alto-based global design firm, IDEO. They challenged two-dozen students to explore ideas that might help the UN protect and support the more than 42 million refugees, internally displaced and stateless people worldwide.

West’s team was charged with going outside the camps and thinking about ways the surrounding communities could benefit from the camp infrastructure – schools, health clinics and water treatment systems, for example – while curbing the impact of thousands of foreigners suddenly setting up camp in their back yards.

A similar trip is currently underway with CISAC's Associate Director for Programs, Elizabeth A. Gardner, Stanford management science and engineering graduate student Aparna Surendra, and Ennead architect Jeff Geisinger, whose Tumblr blog follows their journey.  

The students in Ethiopia visited the UN’s Sherkole and Bambasi refugee camps and their surrounding communities along the border with Sudan. Most of the refugees are from the isolated state of Blue Nile, where conflict broke out between the Sudanese military and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North in September 2011, several months after South Sudan seceded. Since then, nearly 300,000 Sudanese have been displaced; 22,000 are sheltered in the two Ethiopian camps.

Open Arms

Ethiopia is extremely proud of its open-door policy toward people fleeing persecution and conflict. During their initial briefings in the capital, Addis Ababa, the students were told repeatedly that the country’s first refugees were followers of Prophet Mohammed in the 7^th century and then, much later, black Jews from Israel and Armenian genocide victims. The country once known as Abyssinia was never colonized and Ethiopia considers itself the beneficent Big Brother of the continent.

“We have centuries-old traditions of receiving refugees; it is part of our culture,” Ato Ayalew, the head of the Ethiopian government’s Administration for Refugee Affairs, told the students. “We provide our land. But our sacrifice is great – because you cannot replace the environmental degradation.”

Kellie Leeson, the deputy program director for the Horn of Africa for the International Rescue Committee, joined the students on their trip. The IRC, which partners with the UN in many of its camps, facilitated the student visit to the camps.

Leeson asks the Homosha village head whether the Homoshans have benefitted from the camp infrastructure, such as the IRC’s water treatment plant and pumps. Under Ethiopian law, every program targeted for the refugees must have a component that benefits the host community as well, so the IRC’s water distribution for the camp includes pipes to the village. The host community also has access to the new health clinic and school erected on the western edge of the camp.

Musa concedes the water is a plus and some children are attending the camp school.

Still, he says, “The impact outweighs the benefits.”

Musa would like to learn the superior gardening skills from those refugees coming from the Great Lakes region, such as those from Congo. He hastens to add, “But they should not be given any more of our land.”

Outside the other camp about 70 miles south of Sherkole, villagers from Bambasi tell the students how they ran into the dirt road that runs by their thatched huts to greet the more than 12,660 refugees who streamed into the new camp last year.

“The market has brought us together and we hope to have new friendships,” says Romia Abdullah Razak, a 16-year-old girl who ducks into the back of her hut to put on gold earrings before talking to the students. “They seem to be very nice people.”

Nice, until the women came looking for firewood.

The local village militia, paid by the Ethiopian government, rounded up hundreds of refugee women and jailed them when they were caught chopping down trees. They were given warnings and sent back to the camp, but the incident prompted the UNHCR to speed up distribution of kerosene stoves.

Takeaways

West says that beyond the distress over firewood, she is heartened to see projects benefitting both refugee and host communities. The UNHCR is constructing a hospital on the edge of Bambasi, as well as a vocational school where refugees and villagers alike can learn metal work and carpentry.

“The UNHCR is also hoping that providing skills for both the refugees and the host community to help with the economic development of the community and provide refugees with skills they can use when they return home – skills that can help them rebuild their country,” she says. “The challenge, as always, is money and whether they’ll have enough funding for this endeavor.”

She learned that project funding is typically held hostage to annual grant renewals, which undermines critical long-term planning by the UNHCR and leads to a hodgepodge of projects that often go unfinished.

“Shared spaces should be the default for long-term UNHCR planning,” she says.

West, who gets her master’s in this June, is leaning toward a career in corporate social responsibility. She believes companies are part of the solution, through philanthropic work, yes, but also by linking the needs of the refugees with the continued penetration of their products and services.

“I think there’s a really big opportunity for private companies to be thinking about innovation in these camps,” she said. “They have greater funding flexibility, face less of the bureaucratic challenges that are a constant at UNHCR – and they have the ability to really think outside the box.”

 

Rod Ewing, a mineralogist and materials scientist who is an expert on nuclear waste management and policy, will join Stanford University to focus on sustainable energy, security and environmental research at the intersection of physical science and public policy.

Ewing has been named to a joint appointment as Professor of Geological and Environmental Sciences in the School of Earth Sciences and a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, within the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He also becomes the inaugural Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security Studies, an endowed chair established with a $5 million gift from the Stanton Foundation.

Ewing was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2012 to serve as the chair of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which is responsible for the technical review of Department of Energy activities related to transporting, packaging, storing and disposing of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.

Ewing, who earned his Ph.D. at Stanford and was granted a patent for the development of a highly durable material for the immobilization of excess weapons plutonium, is currently the Edward H. Kraus Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan.

He will take up his new position at Stanford next January and will help bridge Earth Sciences and CISAC to encourage collaboration on scientific and public policy projects.

“What is important to me is to be able to see the connections between subjects that, at first glance, do not appear to be connected,” said Ewing, a former visiting professor at CISAC. His research will continue to focus on the response of materials to extreme environments and the increasing demand for strategic minerals for use in the development of sustainable energy technologies.

Ewing, who has been at the University of Michigan for 16 years, will take advantage of Stanford’s state-of-the-art laboratory facilities, such as the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, for his work on the response of materials to extreme environments.

Ewing said in the past five years there has been growing interest in the performance of materials under extreme conditions, such as inside a nuclear reactor.

“There is a practical interest because new types of materials may form under extreme conditions that have never been previously synthesized,” he said. “And in some cases, these new materials may have very useful properties.”

He expects to teach courses in nuclear security, mineralogy, and energy issues.

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Pamela A. Matson, the Chester Naramore Dean of Earth Sciences at Stanford, said Ewing would help the school define a program in strategic minerals.

“This is an area of renewed interest to us, particularly in light of the need for these resources in renewable energy technologies,” Matson said. “To address the sustainability challenges of the 21^st century, we need to both innovate in science and technology areas, and also understand the social and political environments in which decisions are made – and Rod does both. We believe he will help us build a strong partnership between the School of Earth Sciences and CISAC, thus strengthening Stanford’s efforts to solve critical environment and energy problems.”

Ewing spent a year on sabbatical at CISAC during the 2010-2011 academic year. “The quality and diversity of topics really swept me away; everything from terrorism, to nuclear issues to the ethics of war,” he said of his year in Encina Hall.

“Rod Ewing will serve as a vital bridge between science and policy,” said Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Co-Director of CISAC.  “His research addresses fundamental questions about nuclear energy with enormous importance to global security.”

Ewing’s interest in nuclear science was sparked in childhood, when he saved up his allowance to buy the Disney book, “Our Friend the Atom.”

“Looking back at the book, one might call it propaganda, but it certainly captured my imagination,” said Ewing, who would go on to author or co-author more than 600 research publications and become the founding editor of the magazine, “Elements.”

As a graduate student on a National Science Foundation grant, he worked on a neglected field of metamict minerals, a relatively rare group of minerals damaged by radiation emitted by uranium and thorium atoms. The study of these unusual minerals in the last 30 years has blossomed into a broadly based research program on radiation effects in complex ceramic materials. This has led to the development of techniques to predict the long-term behavior of materials, such as those used in radioactive waste disposal.

Ewing will continue to chair the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board as the DOE continues its efforts to find, characterize and license a geological repository for highly radioactive nuclear waste.

“The first issue at hand in the United States is to develop a process for selecting a repository site,” said Ewing. “The challenge will be to combine scientific and technical criteria with the consent of local communities, tribal nations and states.”