Students, Faculty Trained for Humanitarian Action
With tornadoes and floods recently ravaging communities across the country, the importance of emergency response and preparedness weighs heavy on the minds of many, including those of 20 Georgetown students and faculty members, who spent three days learning about the tools necessary to organize disaster relief efforts.
The 12 students and eight professors were selected to attend the first Jesuit University Humanitarian Action Network (JUHAN) Conference, “Engaging Students in Humanitarian Action,” June 20-22 at Fordham University in New York.
During the conference, which resulted from a two-year initiative by Georgetown, Fordham and Fairfield Universities, students and faculty engaged in role-play and discussions about effective disaster management.
In particular, the conference focused on ways to promote prevention and mitigation of natural and manmade disasters, how to assist and protect victims and how reconstruction initiatives help people rebuild their lives.
“It was exciting to see the enthusiasm with which 160 students from 20 Jesuit universities learned about humanitarian emergencies and then put their energies into developing action plans to improve humanitarian action on their campuses,” says Susan Martin, executive director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) and an initiator of the JUHAN Conference.
As a hurricane shelter volunteer in southwestern Arkansas during the 2005 Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Emily Bruton (SFS’11) vividly remembers the devastating effects of the natural disasters that devastated areas along the coast of Texas and Florida. The Georgetown sophomore recalls the unsuccessful relief efforts and the thousands upon thousands of people who simply, as she puts it, were left behind.
That thought was echoed during conference sessions – not only the displacement felt by survivors of U.S. disasters, but also that of refugees in countries such as the Sudan, Somalia and Myanmar.
Global refugee and forced displacement statistics showed there were about 11.4 million refugees outside of their countries and 26 million others displaced internally by conflict or persecution at the end of 2007, according to a report from the U.N. Refugee Agency.
“Attending JUHAN opened my eyes to one of the greatest tragedies of the 21st century. To think that there are some refugees who have lived an average of some 17 years in a refugee camp …,” says Derek Pham (SFS’11). “When it comes down to what to do with refugees, it’s not about playing the sympathy card anymore. It’s about giving them a voice. Even at the smallest level, we all as fellow human beings can give them that.”
In addition to teaching Georgetown undergraduate classes about humanitarian emergencies as the Donald G. Herzberg Associate Professor of International Migration, Martin serves as co-director of Georgetown’s certificate program on refugees and humanitarian emergencies.
Fellow ISIM colleagues Patricia Weiss Fagen, senior research associate and director of training; Steve Hansch, senior associate; Elizabeth Ferris, adjunct professor; Khalid Koser, adjunct professor; and Iain Guest, senior associate and professorial lecturer, all joined Martin in leading discussions at the conference about disaster management issues in the 21st century.
The educators gave instruction on regional complexities in Latin America, East Asia and the Pacific; legal and physical protection; environment and natural disasters; nutrition, food, water and sanitation; reaching vulnerable populations; and working with the media.
For Lauren Funk (SFS'10), JUHAN gave the international politics major much to contemplate.
“It is an essential demand of international social justice and of the faith that we celebrate here at Georgetown to work for the forgotten, the far-away, the poor and the needy. I plan on continuing communication with my new friends at the SFS-Qatar in hopes to incorporate humanitarian activism and education into the two campuses of Georgetown, even though they are halfway around the world from each other,” Funk says, referring to her peers from the School of Foreign Service Qatar Campus who also attended the JUHAN Conference.
Martin agrees with Funk, and says she’s glad to see that the students are already thinking of ways to integrate the lessons learned into their campus lives. “They learned to advocate for the survivors of humanitarian crises," she says, "to host symposiums that bring attention to forgotten emergencies, to arrange immersion study tours to refugee camps in an effort to build awareness of the needs of the displaced and to raise funds that support innovative humanitarian programs.”
All plans, she says, the students are fully capable of implementing.
Source: Office of Communications
June 25, 2008
