Refugee Fun in the City's Parks

You took what you could when they told you your house was now theirs. You shook with fear; there wasn't time to do anything else; you were given three minutes to gather your family and leave. Rifle butts slammed defiant ribcages. You marched, hyperventilating, homeless, into the street with your neighbors, bodies massing for the great Kings County diaspora.

Nearly a million were herded into an area of Prospect Park barely larger than a hundred square acres. Trash cans held nighttime fires. It was hot all afternoon, but you knew winter was on its way. Prospect Park would be your home for the next 15 years.

Aside from the Haitians who came here before Aristide was reinstated; and the West Africans who drove the cabs; and the South Americans and the Salvadorans and the Guatemalans who used to run your vegetables from the freezer to the restaurant kitchens; the South Asians and Lebanese and Eastern Europeans and Afghanis who remembered what this was like the first time around?aside from all those, no one knew what they were dealing with. No more Plan-Eat Thailand, no more Halcyon, no more al di la, no more Grand Army Plaza?not as it used to be.

In 1996, the Paris office of Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) decided to establish a traveling refugee-camp educational exhibit?a dour testimony to abject suffering. Alain Fredaigue of MSF France set up the template for the exhibit that has, since then, visited several European countries. Over the last two years, MSF has worked with the New York Parks Dept. to bring this exhibit to New York City. From Sept. 15 until Oct. 8, Central, Prospect and Van Cortlandt Parks each hosted the exhibit, "A Refugee Camp in the Heart of New York."

The Prospect Park camp occupied Lincoln Rd. Lawn, a small space proximate to bike and jogging paths. Joggers rubbernecked to see the bamboo yurts, the huts with plastic tarpaulin roofs, a fenced-off minefield and the exhibit placards discussing malnourished babies, disease outbreaks, ration queues. Not seeing Sally Struthers, they largely kept running.

The tour group I attended consisted of 12 people, split evenly between white and black New Yorkers, with a few young children in tow. The kids demonstrated surprising maturity as we walked through the facsimile camp: two girls and a boy, the oldest perhaps seven, swung their arms in restlessness or shifted their balance from one foot to the other, but they clearly grasped the magnitude of what they were witnessing. The boy, wearing rollerblade gear and a Pokemon shirt, pointed at a picture of a starving Sudanese baby, its face a death's mask, held aloft by what appeared to be a blue harness and the skin on its legs draped like loose clothing. The boy said, very plainly, "He scares me." His mother pulled him close, but didn't make him look away.

We were given registration badges at the beginning of our mock-internment to demonstrate that, as internally displaced persons or refugees, badges were all that testified to our existence. Without the badges, we couldn't get food. On the backs of the badges were bullet-point statistics?"90 percent of war victims are civilians, at least half of whom are children"; "People in refugee camps typically survive on 5-6 gallons of water per day"?meant to illustrate the conditions under which approximately 39 million live worldwide.

After our 40-minute traipse through horror, our guide, Chris Sauer, told us to get our badges stamped.

"You are lucky refugees," he said. "You get to be repatriated."

That didn't sit well. It was like a twisted Disneyland ticket, making the camp seem like a vomitorium for the guilt of the privileged. The MSF took concerns about the prospects for voyeurism seriously. Sauer, who's worked as a logistics expert for the MSF over the past three years, and who has gone on missions to southern Sudan and Uganda, said it's a hard line to walk.

"There's always that danger," he told me. "But in education, you have to show people what reality is."

Conversation among exhibit attendees was hindered by discomfort. Voices were soft and sometimes cracked. About midway through the tour, Sauer showed us a model outhouse. Sanitation is crucial in refugee camps, to temper the spread of diseases like cholera, which is transmitted through feces. Sauer explained that pits are dug for human waste, with concrete slabs covering them. A model slab, in front of the latrine display, slowed two grooved footprints surrounding a hole the shape of a bowling pin. Not many people wanted to talk about this. One intrepid woman asked: "What about when they need to make a bowel movement?" Sauer squatted over the hole in answer.

While Sauer explained the standards MSF doctors use to diagnose malnutrition, one woman tried halfheartedly to discipline her son, who lagged behind and kicked a soccer ball from one side of the exhibit to the other. The incident elicited one of the fears that must haunt the camp project: of whether New Yorkers are too jaded and disinterested to devote the requisite emotional energy to the thought of refugees. Maybe that kid was overwhelmed, I don't know?but after the very valuable lesson the MSF provided, I hope he can stay a kid in the park for as long as possible, and afterward his mother can tell him the dangers of thinking it can't happen in Brooklyn.