Last Thursday evening, a half dozen Loyola students huddled around a picnic table on their Rogers Park campus, eating lentils and rice out of disposable bowls. They’d pitched two giant tents and a third smaller one in the grassy area next to Mertz Residence Hall, and a makeshift chicken-wire fence marked the edge of their campsite. When they were done with dinner, a couple of them tried to get a fire going in a large metal garbage can while someone else handed out cups of sparkling lemonade.
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“I think one of the goals is to make a spectacle, in the sense that you don’t normally walk down this pathway and see these green tents,” said Brian Christopher, a grad student in social philosophy. “It would be a stretch to say that we’re re-creating refugee camp conditions in any way, shape, or form. But it is attracting people’s attention, and we are handing out literature to passersby….So we’re raising awareness, but not so that people will just say, ‘Oh yeah, hmm, what a shame.’ We’re trying to get people to ask questions.”
The campers ate what they said were the official UN rations given to refugees in the Middle East: lentils, rice, and tea. “I mean, they’re not gonna have tents or sleeping bags or neat little stoves you can build, but we’re eating the same food, and I think it’s just solidarity, kind of, in mind,” explained Marisa Lazio, a junior majoring in social work. But they cooked their lentils over a portable camping stove, and when their Iraqi tent wouldn’t stay up, they used tents from a sporting goods store instead.
Some of the students said they thought of their encampment as a sit-in, and they hoped they might encourage onlookers to let their congressmen know they disapproved of bombing and sanctions in the Middle East. All the campers believed in the power of ordinary people to effect change in governmental policy, if only enough people knew what was really going on.
