Another major component of our class was the South Sudan Refugee simulation. This took place in late November, in the LBCC on campus. We were asked to simulate a Refugee Camp in South Sudan. First we were asked to create an Identification Card, of someone that could be located in the camp, to engage the students with a real life person. This would create a connect to the students with the entire process of living in a refugee camp and the struggles that these people go through.

This simulation was immensely helpful when connecting to the materials. After reading City Of Thorns, by Ben Rawlence where we read the narratives of nine refugees living in Dadabb refugee camp in Kenya. This particular refugee camp was intended to be a short term solution to the refugee’s seeking shelter, protection from the Somalia war, and famine but, now, this Camp in the inhospitable dessert of Kenya, where only plant life is thorns, has become a long-term home for these refugees. “No one wants to admit that the temporary camp of Dadaab has become permanent,” Rawlence writes. These camps are set in place to solve the situation at hand and hope when things cool down in the country somehow you can just close the camp and everything might just work out. But, now that they are looking to shut Dadaab down, are these people going to be Refugees fleeing from a refugee camp? Illuminating the fact that the ‘solution’ of Refugee camps, provides just a temporary Band-Aid on the problem rather than a long-term solution. The struggles at a refugee camp are clearly horrible humanitarian issues, the problems were further described by Rawlence so deeply through these narratives that I had to put the novel down multiple times, because it was just too much. Thus, during the refugee simulation I wanted to engage the students coming to the event just the way that I was engaged with the material in City of Thorns. That is why I choose to do pictures in a power point to illustrate just how gruesome the registration process is in an attempt to connect students with no background knowledge on the struggles around the continent of Africa.