A Window to Refugees’ World

The soft-spoken gentleman with war in his eyes implored the young faces in front of him: “Try to imagine you are the refugee, the person without ID. You have your past, and you will have your future, and that is what will keep you alive.”

Besnik Doli has lived through displacement, and the pain of it still lives within him. Forced out of his Kosovo home at a moment’s notice, the civil engineer and his family shared an Albanian camp with half a million other refugees for four months last year.

Now, at a traveling exhibit near downtown Los Angeles, Doli is describing the experience of sleeping 12 to a makeshift tent in 40 days of relentless rain to a group of high school students who have never before focused on the plight of refugees.

“It’s a wake-up call to see how we’re totally oblivious to what’s going on in other countries and the things we take for granted each day and will continue to take for granted,” said Joel Pitts, 17, a senior at Bravo Medical Magnet High School in East Los Angeles. “Meeting [Doli] is also a wake-up call for me.”

Doli, 36, who returned to his home in Gjakove, Kosovo, 14 months ago, is serving as a volunteer for Doctors Without Borders, the humanitarian aid agency that ran the refugee camp in Albania and is touring the world with an interactive exhibit to foster global awareness. “A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City” has traveled to 100 European cities and New York City--and will be open in Los Angeles through early November.

The simulated camp experience, which opened Wednesday at Exposition Park, includes visits to tents set up for various climates, water treatment and food distribution areas, latrines, a medical clinic, cholera treatment and malnutrition centers and a photo exhibit. It is designed to inform people about the living conditions of 39 million people worldwide--the combined populations of Florida, Michigan and Texas--who are now displaced due to wars or disasters, said Joelle Tanguy, executive director of Doctors Without Borders, which was founded by French doctors in 1971 and won the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

“People associate refugees with the wrong images,” Tanguy said. “They either get disaster fatigue or just have a total misunderstanding of what a refugee is. So ultimately, we want to spark concern and interest and develop knowledge. It’s hard to convey, even within this dire environment, some of the very beautiful human things that can happen.”

Doli, for example, used his English skills to serve as a translator at the camp. In his volunteer role, he interpreted young children’s eyewitness accounts of bombings and slayings of their parents for American psychologists. The exhibit also includes many of the drawings of the war’s youngest victims.

“The first day I couldn’t translate because I couldn’t handle what the children were saying,” Doli told a group of juniors and seniors from Bravo High. “I just cried and cried. I was so embarrassed. By our law, men can’t cry. But then I got stronger and stronger. I thought maybe this was a good job for me, that it was important for people to know what these children experienced.”

The opportunity to help at a camp also struck Simon Spragge, a British doctor who retired from his medical practice in Denmark the day NATO first dropped bombs in Kosovo. Spragge volunteered in Macedonia for four months, tending to 65,000 refugees who suffered illnesses ranging from diarrhea to kidney stones.

Like Doli, Spragge is now telling his war stories at the mock camp, hoping to enlighten others about a reality he believes most people never focus on.

“It changes one’s sense of values,” Spragge said. “It makes one realize that our little problems in the West are not so big compared to what these people are going through. I hadn’t really thought about refugees before. You hear about them dying or starving in gruesome situations. But now I think of them as mothers and children, people who lived decent lives, who had flats and cars like us--and who could be us.”

Real-Life Refugee Experiences

Raphael Saye, 15, and Mary Buachie, 14, were born in the United States, but they know what Spragge means. Raphael’s family is from Sierra Leone, and many of his relatives lived in refugee camps for three years before migrating to the U.S. Mary’s aunt in Ghana lived in a single camp for nearly four years.

The friends, who visited the exhibit Wednesday with a group from the African Community Resource Center in Los Angeles, listened attentively to their tour guide, Luke Thomas, 37, who lived in a camp for six months in 1990 when he and his family were forced from their home in Monrovia, Liberia. Thomas related how he survived on tea, milk and sugar for three months and described watching thousands of his fellow refugees die during a cholera epidemic.

Thomas’ words certainly had impact, but the teens were struck more by the mechanics of the la-trines--essentially squatting in a hole shared by 250 people--and the long hours of labor involved in collecting water and small rations of food.

“We can really live and imagine what our families went through now,” Raphael said. “I can’t really let myself think about this. I don’t want to. It’s hard. Going through all of the stages of the camp, it just sums it all up for me. It’s everything together. Not just one part.”

“I know now it’s all true,” said Mary, recalling her aunt’s pain and suffering.

In Albania, refugees from Kosovo slept under plastic sheeting, Doli explained to his tour group of high school students. When one person shifted, the 11 others in each overcrowded “tent” also had to turn their bodies in order to fit. They ate small portions of rice and beans or high-calorie nutritional bars. And water was limited to 1 gallon per person--one-fifth of a dishwasher cycle--for drinking, cooking and bathing.

“We Albanians have an expression,” he emphasized. “The human being is stronger than rock. I didn’t know what that means, but I learned there that it’s true.”

To help them experience the intensity of refugee life, Doli invited the Bravo High students to squeeze into a similar tent, fed them sweet nutritional bars that some said tasted like shortbread; and somberly pointed to a display of land mines, explaining the dangers refugees face when they return home after war.

But Doli’s eyes, a few students said, conveyed more than his 90-minute tour. “He was reliving what happened to him and he was very sad. You could see it,” said junior Dominique Mhoon, 16, who now questions whether she will be able to handle working as a nurse in an undeveloped country like she had planned.

Even when Doli joked about playing soccer at the muddy camp, senior Veronica Dominguez, 17, sensed his distress. “He always looked so sad, like he’s seen so much,” she said. “In his eyes, you can just tell there’s something that, even in pictures, we can’t imagine actually went on and he saw it in real life. He made us feel how refugees feel.”

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A Traveling Exhibit

“A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City” will remain at Exposition Park, 900 Exposition Blvd., through Sunday. The exhibit is located between the California Science Center and the Natural History Museum.

The exhibit then travels to the Santa Monica Pier parking lot (Ocean Avenue at Colorado Boulevard) from Wednesday to Oct. 29. The final stop is Earvin “Magic” Johnson Recreation Center, 905 E. El Segundo Blvd., Los Angeles, from Nov. 2-6.

The free exhibit is open every day from 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Group tours should be scheduled in advance at (310) 277-2793.

For a virtual visit to the camp, go to https://www.refugeecamp.org.