Picture this in your head for a quick second.

You are back in your hometown for the weekend. Your mom is cooking a family dinner as your father and brother watch sunday night football. You sit there enjoying the warmth of the heat of your house, because it’s too cold outside due to it being fall. Then just as you start to sink into a peaceful state of mind there is a sudden loud crash from outside. Your family quickly looks outside to see your neighbor's house has now been blown away. The only things left of the happy family that lived there is that of grey smoke coming from the crushed building.

Slowly, your once peaceful hometown is now coming under attack. The nights are now full of adrenaline, because sleeping would mean that you weren’t sure you would be waking up. People you used to know are suddenly being killed or have already tried their luck at running. Now living in this never ending nightmare or risking your life by running are the only choices you have left.

See, here is the thing you can blink back to reality and know that your home and family are safe. Refugees can not just blink away the harsh truth of their situation. Knowing that their family members could be dead or that they could possibly never see their homes again is the reality. To know that and still find the strength to fight to find peace at some unknown land is amazing. However, to some they would rather close their borders and states. To deny people coming from hostile environments the right to find some sort of peaceful state of mind is horrible.The blame cannot just be put on them, because maybe they do not know the true risks the refugees go through on their journeys.

That is where Forced From Home comes in. The interactive exhibition presented by Doctors Without Borders is designed to bring more public awareness about the 65 million refugees and displaced people in the world. Given a tour guide a group will be faced with a number of challenges that refugees who flee their homes face on the daily. Also the group will be given information on what the organization does with the refugees that they help in other countries. Such as giving vaccinations to children, helping woman give birth, and provide clean water and foods.

The biggest point the organization tries to stress is that these refugees that are being restricted from entering into countries and states are people. Stripping away the labels such as refugee and ethnic backgrounds, these victims at the end of the day are just people. They too once had their loving hometowns and family dinners. They were just like you then one day their worlds came to a halt and they were then forced to become someone else. They were forced to become survivors as they risked everything to escape from their daily horrors from back home.

Just like Forced From Home, we too should stop thinking about them as just a label such as refugee. We should start to think of them as people, because at the end of the day that is what we all are.