Refugees from Bhutan find a home in the United States

Dambar Bahadur Bhujel was working as a customs inspector and living in a two-story frame house in his native Bhutan when the death threats began.

Mahdu Nepal was six years old when his family was forced to leave its small farming village in Bhutan. "My grandfather was principal of a Nepali school," he said. "For teaching the Nepali language, he was put in jail 24 months. After that the police came to our home and threatened us. By force, we came to Nepal."

Bhujel, Nepal, and their families are among the more than 450 refugees from Bhutan who had arrived by the end of October for resettlement under Church World Service auspices, with hundreds more due in FY 2009.   Read more »

In war-torn Chad, a focus on 'mind, soul and body'

KOUKOU ANGARANA, CHAD Zeinaba Adam, the mother of five children and a resident of the Aradib displacement camp in eastern Chad, is no stranger to guilt.

In the midst of a raid on her village in eastern Chad in March 2007, by those she describes as the Janjaweed, she was shot five times and survived - believing a headscarf she wore acted as a kind of talisman of protection. But it did not offer her full defense from the terrors of violence and trauma. Adam asked her husband, Hassein Bourma, to retrieve a mattress for her. In his return to the couple's besieged village, Bourma was killed. Adam, 26, still feels responsible for her husband's death. Read more »

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