• Abdullah Al-badri
• Jose Gabrielli
• Donald Kaberuka
• Eric Anderson
• Carl Bildt
• Sue Gardner
• Kevin Kelly
• Rick Goings

• Stephen Green
• Jeroen Van Der Veer
• Simon Crean
• Kris Gopalakrishnan
• John Chidsey
• Steve Pagliuca

I ran over to my assignment editor and thrust the press release under her nose.

“A refugee camp simulation? Full of CEOs? Great idea for pictures. Go for it,” she said.

“Great, I’m going to cover a war zone,” I thought. “They’ll dress me up in combat gear and I can make my name as one of those cool reporters that covers the World Economic Forum in Davos each year.”

According to António Guterres, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, the financial crisis is really making it hard for humanitarian causes.

So what better place than a gathering of the world’s economic leaders to raise awareness of the global refugee crisis?

Guterres has teamed up with the not-for-profit foundation Crossroads, which created a simulated environment using actors to recreate what it is like to be a refugee in a war zone. It is running several times a day here in Davos this week.

Off I merrily went this morning, camera journalist Jim in tow, to film some business leaders learning how to live like refugees.

We had a briefing before we went in, and were warned it has proven to be an intense experience for most people.

“Right,” I said to Jim. “Let’s just hang at the back and get some good pictures.”

Unfortunately, hanging at the back turned out to be my downfall.

We huddled into a small tent-like room. An actor in character informed us that the king of our country had been overthrown and the rebel soldiers were coming to get us.

Suddenly, everything went black. Literally. I realised shortly afterwards that the room was now full of armed soldiers, shouting at the top of their lungs and pointing rifles.

It was still pitch black, but my head was spinning.

“I’ve been hit in the head!” I thought indignantly. “They said we weren’t going to be beaten!”

Then I realised my fingers were sticky, and suddenly the whole situation took on a reality I hadn’t expected.

Where was Jim? Off getting some great pictures like the great journalist he is.

We were all of us, including a high commissioner, herded into another room where a solider started yelling at me to get a move on. I then realised there was blood streaming down the right side of my face.

He asked me what had happened. “I don’t know, the lights were off,” I said groggily. So much for award winning journalism.

A nurse was fetched, but in order to maintain the reality of the simulation, I was patched up refugee-style in a cleaning cupboard.

I then had to rejoin the refugee camp as one of the walking wounded until simulated nightfall.

Jim, unaware that my injury was real, merrily continued to film, giving me a thumbs up for getting into the spirit.

Surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, around me CEOs, a high commissioner and other members of the press were having their watches and phones taken from them, being given bread and water and generally being poked at by angry-sounding soldiers.

Jim and I finally managed to extricate ourselves from the simulation, and the organisers congratulated me on having the most authentic experience of any of their clients to date.

It certainly made me think. I’d hate to be a refugee in a war-zone.

They got it wrong, but this has not put off about 2,500 CEOs and policy-makers from coming here in the hope of catching a glimpse of how the world will evolve.

“I am here to get an idea of where this crisis is going,” said Mario Moretti Polegato, Chairman and founder of Italian “no-sweat” shoe-maker Geox.

People have been coming to Davos since the early 1970s to “feel trends”, said Jean-Pierre Cuoni, chairman of private bank EFG International and a veteran at Davos.

“In 1988-89 you could already feel that Communism was coming to an end. People back home thought this was crazy. But only a year later the Berlin Wall fell,” he said while sipping a drink during a swanky reception at the Belvedere Hotel.

No one expects WEF participants to pull a solution to the crisis out of the hat in just a few days of discussions, but many feel the forum continues to be a great place to exchange ideas.

“The forum is needed now and these days more than ever,” Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz said as he addressed the forum on Wednesday.

• Andrei Kostin
• Gerard Lyons
• Jean-Claude Trichet
• George Soros
• Tom Glocer

As Davos gets under way, my feeling from chatting with contacts and listening to conversations around me is that one thing the world economy is really suffering from right now is a crisis in trust.

Institutions failed us.
Governments failed us.

Our own intuition failed most of us (George Soros said today that he protected his capital and had a satisfactory return -- that's certainly better than I did!).

Our advisers failed us.
The media failed us too.

So before we buy again, or invest again, or behave normally again, people need an answer to the fundamental question -- where can I invest my trust.

I think that's the issue behind all of the discussions here.

And solving the related questions of "who is trustworthy now" and "what can we do to create trust in governments and institutions" seems a vital first step.

• Stephen Roach
• Angel Gurria
• Maria Ramos
• Lars Thunell
• Sameer Al Ansari
• Ben Verwaayen
• Ian Livingston
• Alexander Isozimov

Gamefully opening the discourse is Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and President of the World Economic Forum.

If you've got suggestions for Klaus then use the comments section below.

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