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Only six months ago, Gloria was eking out a sparse but adequate living in the dusty Darfur region of western Sudan. Now she's managing on a handful of maize a day in a UNHCR refugee camp in eastern Chad, waiting patiently for the day when she can return. It all started when militants rode into her village, shooting firearms and slashing with machetes. Feigning death, Gloria waited until nightfall before escaping into the desert. Walking for days, eating only insects and roots, stung by the incessant windblown sand, she was finally found by a UNHCR field team. Her ordeal was over at last. Now the horrors are behind her. But so is her old life, and she misses it. She lives in hope. One day, she will return.

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Maria is 17 and already a widow. Last year, members of an armed group rampaged through her remote village in Colombia, shot the men and torched the huts. Terrified, Maria ran into the dense forest, where she walked and hid for days. Exhausted and bleeding, with no identification papers, she stumbled into a friendly village and eventually found herself in the care of UNHCR at a facility in Bogotá. With their help, she was provided with proper documentation. Now, with her ordeal behind her, and armed with renewed hope and a basic education, Maria plans to start her young life all over again.

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Even today, from the safety of her Gothenburg flat, Hana looks back on those terrible days with disbelief: how could the people next door, friends for generations, so suddenly and violently hate her? Why, after centuries of neighbourly cooperation, did the unspeakable evil of ethnic cleansing suddenly explode? Bombed out of her home during the siege of Sarajevo, Hana made her escape by sneaking through the enemy lines at night. After weeks of walking, she eventually became one of the 700,000 Balkan refugees in western Europe. Accepted for asylum in Sweden in 1995, Hana today is a proud mother of two, a successful businesswoman, and deputy mayor of her district.

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It seems that Ibrahim's family has always been suffering the fallout of war - the Soviet occupation, the Taliban excesses, the US-led intervention. Several years ago, the family fled their home in Kabul to escape the brutality of the Taliban, and after a horrendous winter journey, mostly on foot, across snow-covered passes and icy rivers, they arrived, starving, at a UNHCR camp in Pakistan. Several long years later, always dreaming of their home in Kabul, the family finally managed to return - to a house that's nothing more than a bombed-out shell. But though no longer young, Ibrahim is determined to rebuild the family home. With typical courage, determination, and the help of a UNHCR construction kit, this proud former refugee no doubt will do just that.

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As a French-trained physician, Phu came under government suspicion in Vietnam. Fearing for his life, he decided the only way out was to flee by boat to Malaysia. In 1989, he joined a dozen other escapees in an open fishing boat. Twenty parched, sun-blistered days later, he and seven fellow survivors found themselves in the Sungei Besi camp near Kuala Lumpur. Eventually, with the help of UNHCR, Phu was resettled in Canada, where to qualify as a paediatrician, he first had to learn a new language, English. Phu also had to get used to the frigid Calgary winters, which to a Vietnamese brought up in the tropics, is no small matter.