Spotlight on the plight of refugees
Exhibition on displaced people comes to Oakland
The rapid fire of machine guns lets you know the militia is coming down from the hills and that it’s time to go. You grab what you can and hit the road on foot, leaving behind all that you’ve known.
This is a reality shared by millions of people around the world. If you were in their shoes — and they might not even have shoes — could you survive?
Visitors to “Forced From Home,” an exhibit in the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center parking lot off 10th Street in downtown Oakland, will gain a deeper understanding of the dangerous journey made by displaced people around the world.
According to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 65 million people globally have been displaced because of conflict, persecution and human rights violations. That’s the highest number of refugees worldwide since World War II.
The immersive, free exhibit, which runs through Sunday, is hosted by Doctors Without Borders, the medical humanitarian organization. Walking through it was a reminder that compassion for the less fortunate shouldn’t be a scarce resource. One of the most poignant aspects of “Forced From Home” is that doctors, nurses, project coordinators and health educators who have spent time in the field are the guides for the ex-
hibit tours.
I was guided by Paul Brockmann, a country manager with Doctors Without Borders. Brockmann, 55, has worked in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and India. His last assignment was in Sierra Leone on the West African coast.
Brockmann was there in August when torrential rains caused a mountainside to collapse on the outskirts of Freetown, the capital. As many as 1,000 people were killed and 2,000 homes were destroyed in a country already devastated by a decade of civil war and the Ebola crisis.
Where do those people go when they have to leave their homes?
“Well, that was a real issue,” Brockmann said.
They go to temporary camps, and that’s what “Forced From Home” shows viewers. The tour begins in a video dome that gives a 360- degree view of a muddy refugee camp.
At the next stop, you’re asked to take the five items — cards with images of water, clothes, money, photos, jewelry — that you would grab if you had to flee your home. As visitors move through the exhibit, their cards are periodically confiscated, because you’ll lose stuff — or it will be taken — as you travel.
Much of what you, the refugee, carry won’t fit on the kind of vessel you hope will take you to safety, like the rubber dinghy at one station. As many as 40 people pack into such boats while trying to cross the Mediterranean. Many don’t make it.
“This is way fancier than what you would actually encounter,” Mark Leirer, a field nurse, said of the dinghy on display. “They stuff the women and children in the center ... ( and) the men are sitting around the sides. It’s about three, four times what it’s supposed to be.”
It’s an existence most of us are far removed from in our daily lives. “Forced From Home” brings it, well, home.
“I think that’s the power of an exhibit like this,” Leirer told me. “You’re touching objects. You’re hearing individual, personal stories of people who actually interacted on the ground in this context.
“When you come get a story here, it’s something that actually touches you. It’s a lot more impactful than reading it on a piece of paper.”
Disaster recently hit close to home for Brockmann, as many of his neighbors in Santa Rosa had to run for their lives when the Tubbs Fire raged early on Oct. 9. Brockmann’s home was spared, and he offered his place to friends.
“For my friends in Santa Rosa, this is very real,” Brockmann said. “The difference is they had support to fall back on. There were clean water sources. There were no militias. It was still scary as all get out. It was still destabilizing, but if I lost my home, I’m not still being pursued.”
The health care tent at “Forced From Home” stuck out to me. There was a stretcher made out of coated canvas with a hole cut into the center. That’s so people stricken with cholera can lie on their backs and relieve themselves without getting up. There was a white bucket under the hole.
Cholera is spread by contaminated water and food. Recently, there was an epidemic in civilwar- racked Yemen that killed more than 2,000 people.
“And this is the station where we stop taking cards, because we never charge for treatment,” Brockmann said.
The exhibit, like Doctors Without Borders centers, is open, rain or shine. According to Rachel Milkovich, media coordinator for “Forced From Home,” the exhibit drew a total of 13,000 people at the first four stops before arriving in Oakland.
The UNHCR estimates that 28,300 were displaced daily from their homes in 2016, and 55 percent of those refugees were from just three countries: South Sudan, Afghanistan and Syria.
Given the current political climate driven by shortsighted nativism, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that the six wealthiest countries, including the United States, host fewer than 9 percent of the world’s refugees.
We’ve got to do better. It’s simply about doing the right thing to help others.
“Every life has value,” Brockmann said. “Every human has a story, and we’re trying to amplify the voice of our patients who are some of the most vibrant, generous, kind, strong people in difficult situations.”