Students Tackle Disaster Simulation in Harold Parker

A slew of foreign aid groups hustled to respond to a natural disaster and faced a population in political turmoil, desperate to find the basic survival needs for themselves and their families.

Among the displaced refugees there are landmines and armed militia groups, including bands of armed children. Relief workers from organizations such as Oxfam, Red Cross, and World Vision must coordinate with international and local governments as well as each other.

However, this did not take place not half way across the world but in a Humanitarian Studies Initiative (HSI) simulation at Harold Parker State Forest.

The Humanitarian Studies Initiative is a program run cooperatively by HHI and the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University and is designed to prepare crisis response workers for scenarios like we are currently seeing in Japan or Libya.

For two weeks, the group of roughly 85 Harvard students participated in a seminar in preparation for this phase of the program. In the week-long simulation, students play the role of the relief workers while the coordinators throw as many scenarios they would possibly face as possible.

While teams are out in the trails at Harold Parker Forest, they communicate by text messages to a technology station tucked away in a DCR building at the state park.

Manned by a group of applied technology researchers and volunteers, the team uses proprietary software that maps out the crisis with the live information streaming from the field. The information can be used to monitor the crisis and aid planning and coordinate the response.

Other volunteers play the part of the at-risk population, militia groups, and border guards. At the conclusion of the program the teams addressed a panel of relief coordination groups as they would in a real crisis. They report their findings in the field as well as their response plan and budget proposals. The role of the UNHCR, OSCHA, and USAID were played by professors Michael VanRooyen, Stephanie Rosborough, and Peter Walker respectively.

Rosborough, a researcher and instructor at Harvard Medical School, was a coordinator of the event and said the teams of about 7 to 8 students would face some of the real challenges associated with crisis response and team dynamics.

While under heavy stress the teams would need to file daily situation reports, work closely with the United Nations and assess population based needs.

"To develop crisis response plans for their assigned humanitarian agencies their fundamental function was to find, count, and assess population-based needs" Rosborough said.

The program's leadership comes with years of field experience and expertise to pass on. Michael VanRooyen, or "MVR" for short, is a professor at the Harvard Medical School and at the Harvard School of Public Health. Peter Walker is the Director of the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University and is a resident of North Andover. Rosborough is an instructor at Harvard Medical School and established a field hospital in Haiti just a week after the earthquake in 2010, along with VanRooyen and Harvard's Jennifer Chan (photographed front an center at the HSI simulation's tech hub).