Saturday marks a day where people all over the world can stand together and recognize international refugees, understand them—and offer them support. On Thursday, Angelina Jolie, a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, along with the UNHCR High Commissioner, Antonio Guterres, helped launch this year’s World Refugee Day activities.

This year’s events are themed, “Real People, Real Needs.” This is to showcase the fact that all of these refugees are just like us, and have to eat, sleep, and care for their families just as we do.

At the launch ceremony, hosted by the National Geographic Society in Washington, DC, Angelina asked that Americans be aware of the suffering and plight of millions of victims of conflict all around the globe.

To see a clip of the event, moderated by NBC’s Ann Curry, click here.

Click here to join in on Refugee Day live this Saturday from 9 AM to 9 PM EST. The U.N. is all teched-out in Obama fashion, hosting a live audio-visual feed from refugee camps during the day. People who participate can use text messaging, Twitter and video submissions to help spread the word and get involved.

In addition to the live streaming from Djabal, one of the 12 refugee camps run by the UNHCR in eastern Chad—which helps more than 250,000 refugees from Darfur—the online event will also feature refugee camps from Colombia, Pakistan and Iraq. People tuning in may witness, for the first time in their lives, what it is like to be displaced and homeless due to your nation’s involvement in a war, at no fault of your own.

As Angelina said in her speech, forced displacement is simply a fact of life for many people. “Whether it be from Darfur, Myanmar or the Swat Valley, or some as yet unknown crisis, mass migrations will be a feature of our future. We must look beyond the simple numbers and instead at the individual,” she said.

These are well-said words. How often do we hear of a crisis and think, wow, those are big numbers, and carry on through the Starbucks Drive-Thru with our day as if nothing happened?

But we know if it were a single face of someone we know—a relative or a dear friend, or even an acquaintance from high school—it would touch us deeply. We must remember that each one of these people has a face, has a life and a family, and is simply just like us.