Walking In Their Shoes: Inside Vilnius's Experiment in Empathy for Refugees
A 90-minute simulation asked professionals, students and journalists to become asylum seekers for an afternoon — and left many of them rethinking what they thought they knew about displacement.
VILNIUS — On a quiet Tuesday afternoon inside the National Gallery of Art, a room full of professionals — researchers, employment specialists, media analysts, aid workers and journalists — surrendered their names.
For the next ninety minutes, they would not be themselves. They would be Omar, fleeing Syria after years of war and the destruction of his hometown. They would be Olena, a Ukrainian mother forced to leave her home after Russia’s full-scale invasion, carrying only what she could take with her. They would be Amina, escaping Somalia after years of conflict and insecurity, leaving behind her family and everything she had known.
This was "A Journey into Exile," a simulation exercise organized on September 15 by the Refugee Council of Lithuania, designed not to inform participants about refugees in the abstract, but to make them feel — however briefly, however imperfectly — what it is to have no good options left.
A Rehearsal in Displacement
The premise is deceptively simple, and deliberately uncomfortable. Before anything else, participants are handed an identity card and a short biography — a fictional refugee character built from a plausible name, a country of origin, an age, a family history. Alongside it comes a modest allotment of symbolic money, a small, calculated reminder of just how little financial cushion most displaced people actually carry with them. The room is then split into smaller groups, each representing a region of the world where displacement runs highest today.
The simulation opens not with a border crossing but with the phone call, the knock, the rumor — the moment a character learns they have only hours to leave. It is a deliberately disorienting start. In one of the exercise's first tasks, each group is handed a list of belongings — food, water, identity documents, medication, a change of clothes, a mobile phone, family photographs — and told they can carry only a few. The negotiation that follows, over what a life can be reduced to when time runs out, does more to convey the suddenness of forced displacement than any statistic could.
From there, the simulation branches. Having fled their home country, characters face a set of starkly different paths. Some attempt the most perilous route of all: an irregular journey toward a distant country, often crossing borders without documentation, sometimes relying on smugglers, exposed to the real risks of exploitation, trafficking, detention or deportation that accompany that choice in life as much as in the exercise. Others opt to seek shelter in a refugee camp in a neighboring country — nominally temporary, but, as participants soon discover, frequently the site of years-long waits, with only limited access to schooling, work, healthcare or reliable food and water. A third group tries to build a life in a city in a neighboring country instead, only to run into the particular hazards of urban displacement: no legal status, no formal employment, exposure to unsafe work and discrimination, and a constant, exhausting negotiation over housing and survival.
None of these paths comes with a guarantee. As the exercise plays out, some characters do reach safety; others remain suspended in a camp or a precarious urban existence, a distribution that is itself instructive — a pointed reminder that only a small fraction of the world's refugees ever gain access to resettlement in a third country.
There is no script that rewards good instincts. As in the lives the exercise is modeled on, there is no reliably right answer, only choices that lead, gradually and often painfully, to consequences the participants could not have fully anticipated. A decision made in the first ten minutes might not reveal its cost until the final act, when a character is turned away at a border crossing, or granted an unexpected reprieve.
Interspersed throughout are testimonies inspired by real refugee stories — the voices, in effect, of the people whose experiences shaped each character's biography, describing the crossings, the waiting rooms, the bureaucratic mazes and the small mercies that marked their own journeys. The effect, organizers say, is cumulative: not a single dramatic revelation, but a slow accumulation of friction, uncertainty and loss that mirrors, in miniature, what displacement actually feels like. The exercise closes, as such exercises do, with a debrief — a chance for participants to sit with what they felt while making decisions under pressure, what surprised them, and what the experience revealed about the systems and policies that quietly determine who gets to stay, who must move on, and who simply waits.
"For me, many of the facts were things I simply didn't know," one participant reflected afterward. "I didn't expect the road to Lithuania could be this difficult for so many people. It made me look at the situation from another side, and it brought out a real sense of empathy in me."
Who Was in the Room
The exercise drew a notably cross-sectoral audience — a deliberate choice by its organizers, who see empathy-building as most effective when it reaches people who shape public life in different ways. Representatives attended from Mykolas Romeris University, the Lithuanian Employment Service, the research and analysis outlet Mediaskopas, the Balturka platform, the Ukreate Hub, and international press, including The New York Times.
That mix mattered. A civil servant who processes employment applications experiences the simulation differently than a journalist who will go on to write about migration policy, or a university researcher who will teach the next generation how to think about asylum law. By running all of them through the same imagined border crossings and the same impossible choices, the Refugee Council of Lithuania was, in effect, seeding a shared vocabulary of understanding across institutions that rarely occupy the same room.
From Simulation to Application: VolEver
The afternoon's second act moved from the hypothetical to the concrete. Organizers used the occasion to introduce VolEver, a newly launched mobile application designed to connect Ukrainian refugees living in Lithuania with volunteers willing to offer their time.
The app's premise is straightforward, but its ambitions are not modest. Through VolEver, refugees can request support across a range of everyday needs: practicing a new language in conversation, being accompanied to administrative offices where paperwork can be dense and intimidating, learning to navigate an unfamiliar city and its public services, receiving practical help with day-to-day tasks, and — perhaps most importantly — simply finding social connection in a country that is not yet home.
On the other side of the platform, volunteers can offer exactly what they have to give, whether that is an hour of conversation or a single afternoon spent helping someone find their way through a government office. The app's organizers are candid about the scale of what they are asking: not a lifelong commitment, but a single hour, repeated by enough people, can meaningfully alter someone's experience of displacement.
"VolEver is not just about help," the organizers said in presenting the app. "It is about community, connection and solidarity. It brings people together and turns willingness to help into real action."
Why the Exercise Resonates Now
Lithuania, like much of Europe, has absorbed a substantial number of Ukrainian refugees since 2022, alongside ongoing pressure along its border with Belarus, where migrants from further afield have frequently found themselves caught in a geopolitical standoff not of their making. Public opinion on asylum and migration across the continent remains contested and, at times, volatile — shaped as much by headlines and political rhetoric as by direct contact with the people those headlines describe.
It is precisely that gap — between abstract policy debate and lived experience — that exercises like "A Journey into Exile" are designed to close. Simulation as a pedagogical tool is not new; it has long been used in conflict-resolution training and in medical and military education, on the theory that a rehearsed, embodied experience creates a kind of understanding that no lecture or statistic can replicate. Applied to the question of asylum, the method carries an additional charge: it asks participants not merely to sympathize with refugees from a safe distance, but to inhabit, if only for an afternoon, the anxiety of not knowing what comes next.
Whether that borrowed anxiety translates into lasting empathy — or into policy, employment practices, or newsroom coverage more attuned to the realities it depicted — is, of course, unknowable in the moment. But for the researchers, civil servants and journalists who left the National Gallery of Art that afternoon, something had shifted. They had spent ninety minutes without the safety of their own biography. For most of them, it was the first time.
The Refugee Council of Lithuania organizes public awareness initiatives across the country, including "A Journey into Exile" and the VolEver volunteer platform for Ukrainian refugees. For more information on volunteering or requesting support through VolEver, contact the organization directly info@refugeeslt.com
The project is co-financed by the European Union.
The “A Journey into Exile” methodology was developed by JRS Canada and is used under license by Refugee Council of Lithuania.
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