Without a home

Saturday, June 14, 2008 | 2:10 a.m.

A new exhibit at the Lied Discovery Children’s Museum places young visitors in the shoes of child refugees by asking them what they would take with them if they were forced to leave their homes.

The $700,000 exhibit, “Torn From Home: My Life as a Refugee,” urges children to choose wisely, as they likely will walk for miles, cross foreign borders and pick their way around land mines as they struggle to find shelter.

Parents who take their children to see the exhibit must be prepared for questions. As Las Vegas Sun reporter Kristen Peterson writes, young visitors will have plenty of questions after learning that a child in a refugee camp is given a bracelet to wear that helps measure whether he is starving. Mosquito nets, jugs for toting water from a pump and a “house” made from a tarp are foreign concepts to American children but are the daily routine for child refugees in many countries.

Linda Quinn, Lied’s executive director, told the Sun the museum wants “to bring messages to the community that are not part of the norm in the exhibit world.”

This exhibit certainly accomplishes that.

Las Vegas Valley children are fortunate that they have the chance to see how others live, especially because youngsters who have lived as refugees may be among their classmates. Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada’s Migration and Refugee Service has resettled more than 5,000 refugees in Southern Nevada since 2003, the Sun reports. The voices of local children from refugee families are the ones Lied visitors hear speaking from behind the exhibit’s photo displays.

But for all of its seriousness, the exhibit is not without whimsy. Among the displays is one featuring toys, such as a soccer ball fashioned from garbage bags and twine, created by children in a Ugandan refugee camp. While the overall exhibit is likely to elicit questions parents may find difficult to answer, these toys can help illustrate that happiness and optimism can exist anywhere, even in the hearts of children who face grave adversity.