A few weeks ago, I scrambled to evacuate my area with the only five items I could grab—my phone, passport, water, money, and medicine—in the 30 seconds before I had to flee.
Many of the roughly 65 million refugees, asylum-seekers, and internally displaced people around the world today have had to make panicked choices like these; more than 4,000 have died at sea in overcrowded boats and rafts attempting to reach Europe from the Middle East. On Thursday last week, more than 200 additional people lost their lives in two separate shipwrecks off Libya.
But my own “escape” was far away from that, on the safety of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where Médecins Sans Frontières(MSF) had organized the Forced From Home exhibit. The aim was, in part, to put the staggering numbers of the crisis into tangible terms for those of us who don’t have to contemplate actually being forced from home. So I took on the identity of an asylum-seeker from Honduras while my tour guide, Ahmed Abdalrazag, pled with the group to hurry up. If we were really fleeing, he explained, our time would be up and it might be too late.
[For more of this story, written by Anna Diamond, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/in...athy-exhibit/506780/]
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