Grant Park hosts refugee exhibit
Jennifer Vago makes a small circle with her thumb and forefinger, small enough to encircle a broom handle -- or the upper arm of a starving refugee child.
Vago, a registered nurse who has served 10 missions with Doctors Without Borders, is leading a tour of an exhibit that opened Wednesday -- "A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City" -- in Chicago's Grant Park.
"You get this sense of incredible urgency," she says, recalling how she felt when she first witnessed starvation in Sudan. "I need to feed this child now, now!"
From her home in St. Louis, Vago for years sent small donations to the aid group before joining her first mission in 1995. Now 58, she has worked in Sri Lanka, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Sudan, and is among 30,000 people from 100 nations who serve the Nobel Prize-winning group.
In Chicago, she and other guides shared their experiences while showing visitors the shelters, food distribution systems, cholera treatment methods and other features of their work in 70 countries, including the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The exhibit travels next to Minneapolis, Houston and Dallas.
The group, also known by its French name, Medecins Sans Frontieres, gets the bulk of its contributions from the public rather than from governments, so explaining its mission to potential donors is important. The interactive exhibit, launched in France in 1995, first appeared in the United States in 2000.
Students touring the exhibit in Chicago said it allowed them to feel more immediately the plight of the world's 33 million refugees.
They sampled high-protein crackers and saw children's toys created from scraps. Guides asked them to imagine standing in long lines at a water distribution station then carrying a 44-pound water container back to a shelter.
Asyesha Jemison, 17, of Chicago said she learned that one small tent could be the sleeping quarters for 17 refugees. She reflected on her own home.
"I mean, that like touched me because I live in a house and each of us got our own room," she said. "I wish I could help some of these people so they got their own rooms, too."
Some regions -- including parts of Iraq -- are too dangerous for the aid group. In 2004, the group withdrew from southern and central Iraq when international aid workers became targets of violence, but it soon began providing surgical care to Iraqi victims in Amman, Jordan, and, as of summer of 2007, in Iraqi Kurdistan.
"It's obviously of great concern to us what's happening in Iraq," said Nicolas de Torrente, executive director of Doctors Without Borders-USA. "It's estimated half the Iraqi doctors have left the country. … You have rundown and unsafe medical facilities that are overwhelmed by the number of casualties."
The exhibit is free, with tours running from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. through Sunday.