A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the World Refugee Day or sort of announced that it was going to take place at KL Sentral over the 19th and 20th of June. So, on the 19th of June, I decided to head over to KL Sentral to check out the World Refugee Day myself and I did have a bit of fun. What I am also pleased is that my photos also managed to be published here on the Nut Graph. Hopefully they will be able to make an impact and create more awareness about.
Here are some photos which I took when I was there. One of the things I noticed was that there was a huge crowd already gathering around the stage as there was a competition or quiz being held by the UNHCR folks. Basically the emcee will ask a question to the crowd and whoever can answer the question gets a prize.
The UNHCR have set up two booths or rather exhibitions for members of the public to enter in and view. One of them was called “Take a Minute to be a Refugee“. The exhibition provides a view of how a refugee lives by showing images of real refugee shelters look like. A good touch was that they also recreated a room where refugees normally would live in, and this isn’t some single room for a person but where up to 5 people might have to squeeze in and share. This really provided an up close perspective of how a refugee has to live even in our country.
There were plenty of stalls there where the refugees were able to sell some of their wares. I managed to get some items for Mun Tzin during the exhibition which made her very happy. Unfortunately, I only noticed that most of the tourists were the ones who were browsing through the stalls. My theory is that because of where the event was located, which was at the entrance of KL Sentral towards Le Meridien and KL Hilton, that is usually where tourists would walk by. As a local, when I disembarked from the LRT (yes, I took the Putra LRT from Taman Jaya), I couldn’t find where the exhibit was. Location does play a very important role but I am guessing because the locations where there is high traffic, businesses would have already paid the management of KL Sentral for.
Overall, I hope that the event manage to gain more awareness among the public and I even do hope that this blog post and my images will help create awareness amongst the public. This is UNHCR’s first public event on World Refugee Day so I really do hope that there will be more to come.
For more information about refugees, check out this site here.
Take a look at the rest of the images I took below.
