Purpose of the Exhibit
Torn From Home: My Life as a Refugee is a travelling exhibit about the world’s refugees. This exhibit provides a safe environment for children and adults to dialogue about this difficult topic. School age children will have a rare, firsthand look into the lives of refugee children and families from around the world. Young visitors will see how despite the grim surrounding, refugee children still manage to play games and make creative toys from scraps and other things most American’s would throw away.
Visitors will gain a sense of empathy and deep understanding for other children in very dire circumstances. They will leave with a new found respect for refugee children and their families and they will learn that despite the harsh environment and often limited basic needs such as food and water and sanitation, refugees are facing life with courage, hope, and strength to rebuild their shattered lives.
The self guided experience features seven exhibit areas: Home, Losing Home, Registration, Refugee Camp, Medical Clinic, School, and Going Home. The exhibit recreates actual refugee camp settings where visitors learn about shelter, food, medical care, schooling, and play activities of refugee children. Multimedia elements including video, photographs, artwork and testimonials of refugee children from countries such as Afghanistan, Chechnya, Colombia, Congo, Iraq, Myanmar and Sudan, allow children to hear the voices and life stories of refugee children; and engage in interactive age appropriate educational activities on human rights.
Educational Goals
Essential Questions
Visitors to the exhibit will consider the following questions:
Exhibit Component Descriptions
Entrance – Home
This area of the exhibition includes three representative homes of children before they became refugees, showing a spectrum of affect populations in terms of size, location, & ethnicity ( Congo, Columbia, Afghanistan).Leaving Home
This exhibit area answers the questions: What is a refugee? Where are we going? What will happen to me and my family? What can we take with us? Interactive video units address these questions. A large world map displays a geographical perspective of the refugee crises in terms of the sheer numbers. A gallery of authentic portraits, artwork, and written word by refugee children personalizes the story and draws attention to the approximately 9 million displaced children in the world.Registration
Welcome to the Refugee Camp. This area of the exhibition provides an immersive look into the registration and food distribution process in a refugee camp. It also addresses the questions: What is it like to be in a new place? What are the challenges (language, separated from family, food)? An interactive exhibit kiosk explores the nutritional challenges faced by most refugee populations. Once the interactive is completed, the exhibit components visually show students the difference between Refugee and American nutrition. Students and Educators are invited to identify with a real refugee by donning a registration bracelet and assuming the role of a refugee via an ID card.
Refugee Camp
The Refugee Camp focuses on shelter, water, bathrooms, hygiene and how these basic needs are addressed in a camp? Through interactive, hands on exhibits, it also answers the questions: What would it be like to live in such confined spaces with so many strangers? Students are challenged to build their own shelter using few materials. The family tent focuses on an individual family within a camp; where and how they would live. Hand-made toys illustrate the importance of play for all children.Medical Clinic
This area of the exhibition addresses one of the greatest challenges within any refugee setting – health—from malnutrition to disease to dehydration. Students can see the bare bones care available, compare their weights and heights to those of refugee children, and gain insight to the dangerous health conditions experienced by many refugees.School
The area of the exhibition focuses on something that is relevant to all students – Education. Education is of critical importance to any child, particularly refugee children. This earthen school setting reflects the limited resources available within a refugee camp. An interactive maze helps students understand the difficulties faced by many refugee children in attending school in general but also highlights the gender barriers (boy’s verses girls).Going Home
This is the final area of the exhibition and one of the most important as it allows time for processing of the information presented in the exhibition and reflection. The average stay in a refugee camp is 9 years, but what happens afterwards? Learn about the various outcomes for many refugees, including repatriation, resettlement, and many unknown endings. An interactive video kiosk encourages visitors to share their reflections about the exhibit. A resource center allows students and educators to learn more about the myriad aid organizations that work with displaced populations and a reflection board allows visitors to leave/read reflections of their experience in the exhibit.
What teachers and students have said about Torn From Home: My Life as a Refugee
“This exhibit has been a wonderful life experience; I am not the same inside.”
“Every area of the exhibit is an eye opening experience, from the faces on the wall to the need for clean water to the school where teachers try to help keep life as normal as possible for these refugee children. Seeing the example of a school where there might not be a teacher and where supplies are hard to come by, made me want to go immediately and be a teacher in a refugee camp. That was my original goal in becoming a teacher. Seeing it pulled at my heart and made my feet want to run to do it.”
“ Seeing this exhibit is so beneficial to me as a teacher because more than likely I will have children in my classroom who are refugees. Being able to put myself in their shoes for a few hours helps me better understand my future students. Actually, because I am student teaching I have found it has helped me relate to the students a little better, because now I have a little taste of what their lives have been like.”
“ This exhibit was extremely eye opening, because it took you out of your life and let you really experience a little bit of what refugees have to go through. Just the fact of fleeing home with basically nothing but the essentials to survive was something that I knew refugees had to do but being able to put a face and a voice to the act of fleeing just changes how you feel about things.”
“I believe that this experience has added to my repertoire of knowledge so that I can better serve my students and also so that I can better help people in my daily life.”