Moore, a volunteer for the organization Doctors Without Borders, is likely to tell of that incident many times in the days ahead. A psychologist who suspended her private practice in Connecticut to help in the Balkans last year, she has again volunteered her time for the international medical relief group’s current project: a simulated refugee camp in the heart of New York’s Central Park.
The reconstructed camp–which will move to New Jersey and California after its Sept. 15 opening in New York–is intended to highlight the brutal realities of life for the world’s 39 million refugees and internally-displaced people. Some 20 Doctors Without Borders volunteers who have worked in camps around the world will lead interactive guided tours in which visitors will be asked to imagine themselves as refugees forced to abandon their homes and possessions. The newcomers will be given registration cards and the “bracelets of life” used to identify malnourished children. They will see the rectangular BP-5 baked wheat bar–with its instructions to “eat slowly and chew well”–that is used to keep the starving alive.
Visitors will also be able to walk through the disinfectant foot bath at the edge of the isolation compound for cholera victims, view the variety of tent designs used to accommodate refugees in the heat of Africa or the cold of Chechnya, see drawings by displaced children and contemplate the differences with their own lives in industrialized countries. (Example: A person in a refugee camp typically survives on five to six gallons of water a day. A U.S. resident, by contrast, uses 70 to 140 gallons.) “This is a typical refugee camp,” says Luke Thomas, a Liberian volunteer who has worked in camps housing some 500,000 refugees from the west African country of Sierra Leone. “People live there under conditions which are not normal. They’re missing their home, missing their family, having to eat unfamiliar food.”
Of course, a sanitized, odor-free “camp” like the one in Central Park can never convey the real tribulations of refugees whose past traumas can only be aggravated by overcrowded tents and pit latrines. Thomas, for example, still broods over personal tragedies like those of a Sierra Leone woman whose husband was killed in front of her and whose subsequent rape left her pregnant. “She had the child, but she didn’t want to keep it,” he recalls.
Organizers hope, however, that the traveling exhibit–which already has been shown in Europe and the United Arab Emirates–will at least raise awareness among industrialized nations about the plight of the dispossessed. “We don’t want to shock, but we want to explain with respect what our job is in the field,” says Alain Fredaigue, the Doctors Without Borders spokesman who conceived of the project. “We cannot help people if we say nothing. Perhaps if we speak out about these sorts of conflicts we can avoid them.”
“A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City” exhibit will be in New York’s Central Park on Sept. 15 - 16. Other New York-area venues are New Jersey’s Liberty Science Center from Sept. 18 - 24; Brooklyn’s Prospect Park on Sept. 27 - Oct. 1 and Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx from Oct. 4 - 8. The California exhibit will open in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park from Oct. 18 - 22; the Santa Monica Pier from Oct. 25 - 29 and Compton’s Earvin “Magic” Johnson Recreation Center from Nov. 2 - 6.
A series of related panel discussions and presentations will be held to coincide with the exhibit in the New York and Los Angeles areas. A full schedule is at the Doctors Without Borders Web site (http://www.refugeecamp.org)
