If you only had 3 minutes to get out...

what would you take with you? 
So begins the MSF (Doctors Without Borders) tour of a refugee camp.

In a country as rich in money, resources and security as ours, it is easy to take the basics for granted. The average Canadian uses 306 litres of water a day. In a refugee camp, the quota is  5 litres per person, often carried long distances by the women and children.
How many bathrooms are there per person in your house? Ours has 3 for 4 people.
In a refugee camp, there are typically 100 people per latrine, with digestive disorders the norm. And that's if you are lucky enough to even reach the safety of a refugee camp in the first place.

The tour started with us having to "bribe" the border official to let us pass since we weren't carrying passports.

The cholera tent was particularly eye opening. Those who make it there and recover tend to do so quickly once given intravenous fluids, but many don't survive. Dehydration from chronic diarrhea is a major killer. It is common, as displaced people must often travel long distances with little access to water in order to reach relative safety.

There are the usual kinds of photos that we've all seen at some point (children with bloated stomachs receiving nutritional supplements, long lineups of people behind razor wire, etc.), but there are others too. We saw pictures of people who are dressed in clothing like any of us here would wear, clearly people who recently enjoyed privileges similar to our own. These really hit home for me. People don't plan on being uprooted.

Could we cope living like this? Sure, maybe for a weekend. But these aren't always temporary situations. This isn't a family camping trip. Through no choice of their own, some people live like this for years, even decades, often with the fear of being sent back to certain death, often wondering if relatives are alive and if they'll ever see them again.

We saw the mental health tent, full of children's drawings of violence they'd encountered. In many countries, gang rape is used as a weapon against women and children. HIV is not a stranger. And the culture ostracizes its victims.

42 million people are uprooted by war. That's more than the entire population of Canada. It's difficult to comprehend, and all too easy to forget or ignore.

The tour is child-friendly (not a lot of graphic images, upbeat, but realistic too) and takes about an hour. It is currently at Waterloo Town Square in Ontario and will be touring the west coast next summer.

See: http://refugeecamp.ca/about-refugees/  for more information.

Photo credits:
Top:© Pascale Zintzen/MSF A camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Masisi, Democratic Republic of Congo, where 2,300 families have sought shelter after fleeing violent attacks throughout North Kivu province (2008).
Bottom: © Daniela Abadi/MSF Ethnic Hmong refugees from Laos are currently confined to a camp controlled by the Thai military in Thailand’s northern Petchabun province.  Once a day, Hmong refugee children are allowed to leave the camp to attend school (2008).