Luka Isaac Batakwa reminisced about the scary night when he lost his four relatives when gunmen belonging to the terror group Boko Haram raided his village in Nigeria.

He had seen and had enough and made up his mind to flee to neighbouring Cameroon. There, he joined thousands of other refugees who had fled to seek sanctuary in Minawao in Cameroon’s Far North region, about 64 km east of the Nigerian border.

“We were looking for shade everywhere, and our houses were blown off by the winds … During rainy season like this, the wind will come from nowhere with full force to blow off our houses all the time. I (used to go to) the neighboring villages to seek shelter. At times in the daytime, this place was very hot,” recalled the 46-year-old man.

The new arrivals accelerated the desertification process in the semi-arid region, ripping up the few surrounding trees for firewood and leaving nothing but sand and rocks.

There is hope now. Since 2018, trees, including neem, acacia and moringa, dot the over 600-hectare landscape of the Minawao refugee camp, where approximately 70,000 Nigerians have sought shelter from violence in their homeland.

The land is sandy, dry and scorched by the searing sun of the African Sahel, but that has not stopped refugees from planting nearly half a million trees, which has turned an extensive area of desert into forest and changed people’s lives.

“Now we have enough trees in the camp, our houses are not blown off like before, and we have good air to breathe,” Batakwa, now the president of Nigerian refugees in the Minawao camp, told Xinhua standing in front of his mud-walled house roofed with white tarpaulins and surrounded by trees.

Shouck Ali, another refugee, was one of the first to begin planting trees when he arrived at the camp in 2013.