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Hope on the Brinks: Dreams and Nightmares Crossing Borders-bookcover

By: Kelly A. Yotebieng

Hope on the Brinks: Dreams and Nightmares Crossing Borders

Pages: 138 Ratings: 5.0
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Much writing and popular media coverage of forced migration portrays refugees in a frame of helplessness and vulnerability. Focusing on the ‘suffering refugee’ obscures our ability to recognize the collective strength of refugee communities and how these strengths allow displaced persons to reorganize their lives in informal settlements in growing cities of the developing world. This book sheds light on how a growing population of urban refugees from Rwanda rebuilt their lives and communities after conflict and displacement in Cameroon, and how quickly things can change when their legal situation is called into question. Turmoil in the Central Africa region has led to over 500,000 refugees and asylum seekers arriving over the past several decades in Cameroon, the safe haven of the Central Africa region. This book aims to present human faces to the sea of refugees dominating our television screens, illustrate the range of their experiences rather than boiling the trajectories down to simple flight and displacement, and underline how their situations demonstrate resilience and hope in their ability to endure extreme hardship in chaotic urban environments. Indeed, even under the guise of rapidly changing and exclusive immigration policy, displaced persons try to keep their lives moving forward. A better understanding of hope and practice that lead to desired outcomes of refugees within growing urban centers in developing countries is imperative to inform these resilience building programs that humanitarian agencies are still grappling to design.

Kelly A. Yotebieng is a Fulbright fellow in Cameroon. She is currently finishing her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology as a United States Institute of Peace Randolph Jennings Scholar and Presidential Fellow at the Ohio State University. She also holds a Masters of Public Health from Tulane University and a Bachelors in Applied Medical Anthropology from the University of South Florida. Her research and applied work focuses on the roles of hope and risk in enduring hardship among urban refugees in Columbus, Ohio, and Yaoundé, Cameroon. She has spent over 14 years living and working in Central Africa on humanitarian, public health, and human rights issues, both as a United States Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon and a humanitarian and researcher in Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Rwanda, Burundi, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She lives with her husband and two children in Columbus, Ohio. This is her first book.

Customer Reviews
5.0
1 reviews
1 reviews
  • Jean de Dieu

    The stories are real. The struggles are real.
    The life of the refugees couldn’t be better written than on hopes of the Brinks. Thank You MS.Kelly Yotebieng For sharing your story.
    I was born in Africa. I relocated to the United 25 years ago.
    These stories needed to be told.

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