PHOTOS: Put Yourself in a Refugee's Shoes at Battery Park Esplanade

FINANCIAL DISTRICT, NY — Imagine sitting in front of your tent, which is your house, with nothing to do. No books, no media, no nothing. You sit for hours, and then for days, and the days eventually turn into years, and then decades.

That's the reality for tens of thousands of refugees and internationally displaced people that Doctors Without Borders (MSF) works with on a daily basis. It's the horror that has most resonated with MSF project coordinator Chip Hunter in the several years he's volunteered for the international organization. To Hunter, who has been on the ground with MSF in Tanzania, Libya, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, a life with nothing to do is a trauma in and of itself.

This sort of intense hopelessness of refugee life is just one thing people will gain from going to the MSF's Forced from Home traveling exhibition on the Battery Park City Esplanade this week. The exhibition is meant to help New Yorkers better understand the hardships millions of international refugees face.

Located right on the Hudson River from Sept. 23 to Sept. 27, the exhibition features interactive sets with materials gathered from MSF's refugee camps, rescue missions and emergency medical projects around the world. Project coordinator Hunter is one of several tour guides on the MSF staff who lead groups through the exhibition. The exhibition focuses on MSF's projects in Afghanistan, Burundi, Honduras, Syria and South Sudan.

When you arrive at the outdoor exhibition, an MSF staffer will take you through the experience of a refugee by asking you to choose just five belongings as the only ones you can take with you. You'll be assigned a card that designates you a refugee, asylum seeker or internationally displaced person. Each designation has distinct implications, depending on which countries will take you in and which treaties apply to you. Here are some example cards:

When you enter multiple countries, your tour guide will force you to give up some of your five belongings to cross the border, a direct reflection of refugees' realities.

Exhibition-goers sit on a raft like millions of refugees have traveled on across massive seas. They stand in front of a typical MSF hospital tent, a cholera treatment tent and tents exactly like the ones refugees live in. They touch refugees' belongings and cell phones and real toys they have pieced together using plastic bags, scraps of trash, old rags and anything else they can find. The exhibition ends with a virtual reality session where visitors get access to multiple refugee stories through a 360-degree screen.

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"My IT tech guy in the Congo has never walked on pavement," Hunter said. "That's how dramatic some of these stories are. He was born in the camp. He's in his early 20s, and he's never walked on pavement."

Refugees has become a hotly political topic in the current election. Hunter was asked about the group of Americans who are scared letting refugees into their country is a security risk.

"Awareness, and having faces, is so important. If it's not a million Middle Eastern refugees, and instead, it's my friend, Ahmed, who worked for me as a doctor, that's much less threatening than these sort of faceless, imaginary people that we're trying to protect ourselves from."

Hunter recognizes the significance of taking people through the mental trauma of being displaced from home right next to Ground Zero, the center of America's most traumatic event of the past few decades.

"It hits home," he said. "This is a place [Ground Zero] where generations later, the effect that it has is still here. And it's no different at refugee camps. It has a multi-generational impact."

The Forced from Home traveling exhibition is going to Washington D.C., Boston, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia in the next month, and will be on the Battery Park Esplanade until Sept. 27. Details for registration, related events and exhibition dates and locations can be found here.

Image credit: Sarah Kaufman/Patch