Some Boston University students gave up their rooms for tents and their driver’s licenses for ration cards when they participated in the School of Public Health mock refugee camp at the Medical Campus yesterday afternoon.
The mock camp resembled the Chikar refugee camp in Pakistani Kashmir, which held many of the 3.5 million people displaced after the 2005 earthquake in the region. The American Red Cross teamed up with Students of the Managing Disasters and Complex Humanitarian Emergencies program to arrange its second annual simulation.
“It’s eye-opening to personally experience it,” said SPH student Gary Yu. “It was well-done, well-researched and well-organized.”
Participants who volunteered to role play as refugees received ration cards, looked for missing family members and had the opportunity to apply for emigration to other nations. Visitors to the camp saw displays of tents and latrines and were offered samples of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food, which is fortified peanut butter for malnourished people.
Regina Szwadzka, International Social Services director of the American Red Cross Massachusetts Bay Chapter, organized the first mock refugee camp four years ago, but has since transferred the organizational duties to BU students.
International Health Department lecturer Monica Onyango approached Szwadzka two years ago with the idea of joining forces, and the mock refugee camp is now entirely run by BU students. The camp is also a portion of a graded assignment for certain students in the Managing Disasters program.
SPH student Matthew Page, a Managing Disasters student, said the camp is not attempting to draw attention to a specific part of the world, but rather make visitors grasp the broader conflict of refugee displacement.
“They always emphasize the sexiness of humanitarian work,” said Asef Karim, former volunteer for the Red Crescent, the Muslim branch of the American Red Cross.
Karim, a Managing Disasters program student, said “hidden problems” such as oral health need just as much attention as malnutrition or malaria in refugee camps.
In recent years, international crises have been mishandled, and there are still lessons to learn, Page said.
Relief organizations are now working toward more sustainable solutions, such as housing refugees in villages rather than camps, allowing them to retain as much normalcy in their lives as possible, Page said.
Karim said the general public is ignorant of areas in need of relief, such as central Africa — which has many displaced people — but he said he hopes the mock refugee camp and other events will inform people of problems that arise when handling international crises.