Climate change displacement is a growing phenomenon that has been becoming relentless as the climate crisis remains unsolved. Thousands of people have had to flee their nations as their homelands become uninhabitable.
Contributor to Global Citizen's Emerging Creatives Program, Stephen Pech Gai, is a South Sudanese refugee living in Zimbabwe. His creative work lies in photography and written storytelling. Gai is also an environmental activist writing about and organizing around issues of climate change — particularly climate displacement.
As part of the Emerging Creatives Program, each contributor creates a piece of work, based around a systemic issue that they advocate against, where they are welcome to demonstrate their talent and skills to be to be platformed by Global Citizen. As the June 2025 creative contributor, Gai worked on the following photo story, “Home away from home,” where he reflects on the importance of protecting nature through the lens of his refugee experience.
When we were young, we sat by the fireside to learn stories. Stories of heroes and heroines, told in the form of fairytales, fables, and myths. That is how we built our knowledge system.
We weren’t taught how humans burn forests, carelessly cut down trees, or use merciless tools to destroy our world. We weren’t taught about different places where we would be forced to live as marginalized and non-privileged away from our original homeland that we knew the best. We knew the world to be positive because, to us, that was what it was.
Humans just lived and thrived by the dictates of nature. The food we ate, the water we drank, we acknowledged that all came from the earth.
But in the span of our lifetime, things certainly changed — we tampered with the balance of nature. Then came the collapse of our environment and climate system, which defines the catastrophic ecological problem we face, yet we are lethargic to act.
Stephen Pech Gai embraces a young Neem tree that his organization planted as part of their program of greening public centers at Tongogara Refugee Camp. Gai's organization, Refugee Coalition for Climate Action (RCCA), organizes tree planting events, community clean ups, and general education sessions on climate change and environmental action to raise awareness for young refugees in the camp in Zimbabwe.
For forcibly displaced people like me, climate change has come to seal us away from going back home. It has accentuated our protracted displacement. It has increased our numbers and made our flight more arduous and the solutions more daunting.
The people who are supposed to welcome us are wondering whether they can receive us or push us back, because there is no mechanism for protecting people whose homelands fell through the cracks — into the deep sea, burned and charred by fire, or struck by drought and famine.
We are caught between no home to return to and no one to turn to.
It had never been our wish to flee and felt unaccepted, no one wants to be away forever. Home is not only the country you’re born to by name — it’s where our cultural heritage is rooted deep underground. It’s where our great-grandparents were buried. It’s the place where the trees we knew from childhood fall and rise again and never go away.
However, while we are obligated to be away, we can fight humanity’s common problems on a new front. Everyone has something to offer.
There is an opportunity to create new stories to marshal action. Human beings think in stories, and our action is guided by stories. Writers should be at the forefront of bringing about climate action through their pen.
So far, the character has been human. Our stories have put the destroyer at the center, and we are far from finding a solution. That is why the destruction has been greater in our hands. On this new front, our stories need new characters, characters who cannot speak for themselves.
Young people from Refugee Coalition for Climate Action (RCCA) listen to instructions on how to move through the forest ahead of the Chirinda Forest Visit in Mount Selinda, Chipinge, Zimbabwe. After witnessing the destruction of Tropical Cyclone Ida on the Tongogara refugee camp in 2019, RCCA was formed to empower and inspire young people to lead on climate action.
Through the work of my pen, I am beginning a new project — a project that seeks to personify some of the distinctive trees I have grown up with. In doing so, I hope to awaken the respect they must hold within the heart of our ecosystem, to spare them from the mercilessness of our hands.
When I arrived in Tongogara Refugee Camp in Zimbabwe, everything was unfamiliar to me: the food, the language, and the environment. I arrived in the freezing winter, exposed to a cold I had never felt before in my life. But what made me feel at home wasn’t just the kindness of refugees smiling through hardships, or the generosity of ordinary Zimbabweans who intuitively saw Africans as just the same people; it was the sight of the neem tree that truly gave me a feeling of being at home.
In our childhood, during the sweltering summers of Ayod County in South Sudan, the neem tree, with its magical resilience and evergreen leaves that transcended all seasons, was where we took refuge — whether at home or in the bush while tending cattle. When we caught malaria or even a slight fever, neem’s bitter leaves would be boiled, and we would drink the infusion. When we woke up, we used neem twigs as toothbrushes.
In Tongogara, where temperatures reach 45 degrees Celsius, households that planted the neem tree have a perfect shield from Tongogara's brutal heat. Neem’s canopy doesn’t just offer shade but comfort to refugee women returning from the long hours of irrigation fields, exhausted.
Seeing the neem tree in Tongogara was not just a memory — it was a symbol of home away from home. In South Sudan and across many parts of Africa, neem is known as the healer of many wounds. In Congo, they call it Aribayini or the “curer of forty diseases.” In Zimbabwe, where it has no local name within the community I live in, people have come to admire it.
In a distant land, I am glad something of home has followed me. Just as the neem endures drought, it inspires me to keep pushing through the unspeakable challenges of refugeehood. The neem has crossed cultures, just like refugees cross borders. Nature has no visa, trees don't queue up waiting to grow at the other side of the border, and they travel by wind, birds and insects.
The biggest neem trees at the Tongogara Business Centre. RCCA has planted over 1,000 trees in and around Tongoara Refugee Camp in Zimbabwe.
In Tongogara Business Centre, where the biggest neem tree is, children walking from school in the afternoon often pass through Eric Shop and take their deepest breath.
This is the place where motorcyclists or Boda riders wait for passengers in their daily hustle of making ends meet.
Eric's neem tree in the camp is known for all things good. It is more than a landmark; it is where weary travelers pause and find their breath, while others wait for opportunity to come their way.
Beyond the boundary of the refugee camp, the bush (natural vegetation) has vanished.
Since the camp lost electricity in 2014, refugees and host communities have turned to cutting trees for cooking, for charcoal, and for burning bricks. The land no longer regenerates.
Stephen Pech Gai
Pictured here, another area degraded by the firebrick business, outside the Tongogara Refugee Camp in Zimbabwe. Due to various factors, over the last few years trees around the camp trees have been cut for cooking, charcoal, and burning bricks.
Stephen Pech Gai
An area degraded by the firebrick business outside of the Tongogara Refugee Camp in Zimbabwe. Natural vegetation around the refugee camp has become sparse due to a climate-induced energy crisis and a lack of basic resources for refugees.
Charcoal is made out of desperation, not ignorance. It’s what some refugees and host community members must do to survive, by selling it to other refugees who can buy it, with their loved ones’ remittance from the diaspora. A cycle born not of choice, but of necessity.
But for the neem tree, it is rarely in abundance within the refugee camp and hardly anywhere in the bush. The local community doesn’t even have a name for it, despite its well-to-do nature in the local environment.
In a place stripped of green, the neem has come home to offer its kindness. It grows quietly, with grace, needing little but giving much — shade and medicinal power.
I want people to value the power of this tree. This is why my organization, Refugee Coalition for Climate Action,is growing a large nursery in Tongogara.
We will plant trees that heal the soil and cool the air. But it is the neem tree I go after, my childhood friend. It is the neem I must immortalise in my stories. If we teach our communities that trees can speak, that they are alive and listening, people must strive to preserve them. In my writing, I am not just telling a tale. I am preserving a character.
Read more from Stephen Pech Gai:
- The Quarantine of Death — A poetic yet haunting account of the mass displacement and cultural erasure of the Nuer people during South Sudan’s conflict. It laments the silencing of a community and the loss of identity in the face of violence.
- Hope Away from Home — Set in Tongogara Refugee Camp, this story portrays a mother and daughter rebuilding their lives after fleeing war. It highlights the emotional toll of displacement and the small acts that sustain hope in exile.
- This House is for Cyclones — A detailed narrative of a refugee mother’s struggle to protect her family from an impending cyclone, revealing the climate vulnerability and fragility of life in camp settings.
- A Journey Back Home — the story of a father’s difficult return from Harare to Tongogara Camp after failing to secure employment.