Earthquakes. Tsunamis. Political unrest. All of these issues have affected international students studying abroad this semester.
Syracuse University Abroad officials say they have maintained concerns about safety, but circumstances like these have happened before.
“Study abroad doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s in the real world,” said Jon Booth, executive director of SU Abroad. “We’ve been running programs continuously for 50 years, and we’ve had the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the war in Iraq. We’ve had to deal with SARS, flu scares and, of course, the Pan Am flight in 1988.”
Situations like these will happen, and there will be some risk involved, Booth said.
“We’re constantly monitoring world news. We have emergency procedures and protocols in place, and we revise them every semester, if not more frequently,” Booth said.
SU Abroad handles every situation differently, Booth said, but there are many safety precautions put in place for students. Students receive a predeparture orientation that identifies the risks, an emergency contact card, a 24-hour toll-free hotline and an access code to International SOS, an organization that provides students with contact information for a reliable, English-speaking doctor.
Following the Japan disaster, political unrest in the Middle East, a student drowning in Spain and the death of two college students who got caught in a crossfire between soldiers and drug traffickers in Mexico last year, some universities are rethinking their abroad programming, according to a March 17 article in The New York Times.
Many U.S. college students preparing to leave for Japan to start spring study programs are debating whether or not they should cancel their plans, according to the article. If students cancel, they could lose a semester’s worth of academic credit because their home college campuses are well into the spring term, according to the article.
As for SU, Booth said its extensive study abroad program opens students to new situations and cultures, and there is inherit risk associated with that experience.
“If you never go anywhere, nothing will ever happen to you,” Booth said.
When political turmoil broke out in Egypt in January, the four students studying at the American University in Cairo through SU Abroad’s World Partners programs were told to evacuate, according to a Feb. 9 article in The Daily Orange. All the students were flown out of Egypt by Feb. 2 and given the option to continue their studies at locations in Istanbul, London or another country in the Middle East, according to the article.
SU Abroad’s World Partners programs have suspended the affiliated program in Cairo for next semester, but may reinstate it for spring 2012, Booth said.
After a 9.0-magnitude earthquake devastated Japan in March, SU’s abroad office contacted the four students there and suggested they consider coming home or pursuing SU Abroad’s program in Hong Kong, Booth said. But SU Abroad has not canceled the two Japan programs the four students are in, he said.
Booth said all four students are OK. Two of the students were planning to study at Waseda University, but were in between semesters and staying in Tokyo when the earthquake hit.
The abroad office urged the students to leave Tokyo because of power outages, but left it to the students to make the final decision.
“We told them we were reserving judgment if they could return for spring, and one student is going to the Hong Kong program,” Booth said.
Another student visited friends in southern Japan to be away from Tokyo, he said. That student will return to Waseda University in May to continue studying, as the start of the semester there has been postponed until that month.
The remaining two students studying in Japan were more than 300 miles away from the most hard-hit area and nuclear plant when the earthquake hit, Booth said. They had already made travel plans to visit Okinawa, so SU Abroad encouraged them to keep their plans and bring their belongings with them, Booth said.
Following the earthquake in Japan, the Lillian and Emanuel Slutzker Center of International Services also offered counseling services and advised students whose hometowns were in the affected area of Japan to remain in the United States, according to a March 11 article in The Daily Orange. At the time the earthquake struck, there were 58 international students from Japan on the SU campus, according to the article.
“There aren’t as many students trying to go home now as we had right after the earthquake and the tsunami,” said Charter Morris, assistant director for immigration and scholar services. “We did have a few people who wanted to go home immediately.”
Travel to and within Japan remains difficult, but the conditions have improved, Morris said.
Some students were simply trying to get in touch with family and friends back home, which the center helped make possible, Morris said.
“We’ve accounted for everybody, we know where everybody is,” Morris said.
The Slutzker center is now reaching out to recently admitted Japanese students to see if they still plan on coming to SU in the fall, Morris said.
“We’re seeing if they need assistance or need us to delay their entry so they can take care of things back home,” he said.
Yui Matsumoto, a senior international relations major who has family in Japan, is currently studying at SU’s Strasbourg location, where she said she feels “pretty safe.” She has also studied abroad in the highly populated city of Hong Kong and in Madrid, where she said she would firmly guard her purse.
She has retained ties to those back in Japan and contacted several SU and State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry alumni currently in or near Tokyo to make sure they and their families were safe. Conditions in Japan depend on the area. In the Tohoku area where the earthquakes, tsunamis and nuclear threats have affected residents, the living condition is still devastating, Matsumoto said in an email.
In other parts, Matsumoto said, life is going on as usual.
“My family lives in western Japan near Kobe/Osaka where there was no actual damage of the earthquake,” Matsumoto said, “and things are completely the same over there.”
