How UNHR’s Simulation Prepared Me for Human Rights Field Work
Ky Miller
April 2024
When I arrived in Panamá City, Panamá on January 2, 2024, I felt anxious, underprepared, and overwhelmed. Sure, the weekend-long simulation a few months prior had given me a sense of how to do human rights documentation and the name of the organization I’d be working with, Cultural Survival (CS), was the same, but as fun and educational as that was, I was convinced that it could not even come close to the boots-on-the-ground work that I was about to do. I felt like I was stepping off the deep end—and I was worried that there’d be no one there to catch me.
But after meeting with the Cultural Survival team and a quick plane ride to Almirante, my colleague Anamaria and I began to realize that the similarities between our burgeoning experience in Panama and the simulation back in Connecticut extended far beyond note-taking and organization names—particularly when it came to trust, security, and unexpected people in unexpected places.
We spent a week traveling throughout the region with a team of four from Cultural Survival, a supervisor from the University Network for Human Rights, and a local guide to conduct interviews with a variety of stakeholders from four villages that had been inundated by flooding resulting from the Changuinola-75 hydroelectric project. Construction and subsequent flooding of the AES-owned dam began in 2007, but many locals still had not received compensation for the land, crops and cattle they lost—and many of those that were compensated by AES were caught in conflict over who received how much, and for what.
I was struck by the complexity of the web of relationships that it was our job to disentangle. We conducted dozens of interviews in teams, pairs, and solo, which I felt incredibly well-prepared for after two days spent conducting interviews about related topics during the simulation.
At our sites in Panama, just like in the simulation, generations-deep social ties became frayed by unequal compensation for losses as bad faith actors planted the seeds of distrust among and between families. One group of petitioners (Group A) before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was pitted against the other, and became incredibly angry when the CS team went to visit the other group (Group B) involved in the case. Meanwhile, Group B became deeply suspicious of CS and UNHR’s intentions when we inadvertently visited flooded sites in a company-owned boat. When we tried to visit Group B’s village the next day, we were greeted with extreme distrust verging on anger and immediately told to leave the village and not return.
After some serious communication via WhatsApp and email, the CS and UNHR teams were able to convince the leaders of Group B to sit down to a long lunch, where we were able to reestablish trust. Much like in the simulation, sharing a meal created the context and space for trust-building and vital information-sharing after a period of rupture. We were finally able to reconnect with Group B and interview affected families in their community over a 150-person village meeting and meal.
Towards the end of the trip, the CS and UNHR teams hypothesized that Group A had been essentially bought out by the hydroelectric company and that the main organizer with the group was working closely with a member of a local conservation organization—also a petitioner in the case—who sought to control Group A’s actions. This mirrored the situation between miners and company officials in the simulation, where individuals involved with company activities were hesitant to share concrete information or meet at all with human rights factfinders.
Throughout our entire time working in and around these villages, the CS and UNHR team also had to be particularly careful about cybersecurity and bodily security, which were also recurring themes during the simulation in Connecticut. We kept our phones off or on airplane mode during sensitive interviews and interactions to protect the data being gathered for the case as well as the individuals involved. More stressful, though, was the threat of bodily harm by company agents—or, before we knew their intentions, individuals from Group B.
On the second day of our series of visits to the four villages, we left passports and notes from prior meetings at the hotel in case we got held up by trucks or armed individuals in the road. We also designated a specific member of the team as the emergency contact, and that person also stayed back at the hotel prepared to contact the embassy and UNHR and CS staff on-call for any kind of emergency. The importance of the latter became palpable after, on the last day of our visits, we were followed all the way down the main road by heavily armed company trucks. Thankfully, they only intended to intimidate us.
Facing these situations in Panamá made me particularly grateful for the intimidation and scary experiences that the simulation exposed me to in a safe, curated environment. If I hadn’t been pushed into a shed by an actor playing a key contact under threat, told to throw my phone in a dryer, and moved to tears by this woman’s commitment to acting as traumatized and terrified as possible, I probably wouldn’t have kept my calm during the real situations of stress and duress that we faced on the ground in real life.
I’m incredibly grateful to the entire UNHR team for dedicating their time and expertise to the simulation experience in order to ensure that students like me are fully prepared to carry out human rights documentation work in reality. My experience in Panama truly would not have been as rich and fulfilling personally and academically if I had not had the opportunity to push my limits and learn from my mistakes in a safe, controlled environment under the guidance of experts in the field. I look forward to remaining involved with UNHR and future simulations as we continue to support human rights work across the globe.
