Simulation of Darfur Refugee Camps Trains Future Humanitarian Leaders

From Harvard Public Health Now, 15 May 2009:

To a casual visitor, the Harold Parker State Forest in North Andover, Massachusetts, may have looked bucolic during the weekend of April 24 to 26. But for 60 aid-workers-in-training who camped in the forest those three days, it was no walk in the park.

The workers-in-training were graduate students from HSPH, Harvard Kennedy School, Tufts University, MIT, Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center, and other Harvard teaching hospitals. They were participating in an exercise to simulate the refugee situation in Eastern Chad, where thousands of people have fled following violence in the neighboring Darfur region of western Sudan.

Each student was assigned a role in one of eight non-governmental organization (NGO) teams. The students were tasked with planning transportation routes, sanitation facilities, and medical services to meet the needs of the simulated population. These tasks were completed under an increasingly intensifying security situation with faux military checkpoints, gunman attacks, and security evacuations modeled after actual events along the Chad-Sudan border.

PRI’s The World also had a report on the same simulation—you’ll find an audio slideshow about it here.