As anti-government protests continue in Egypt, study abroad programs are rushing to evacuate U.S. students.
Inside Higher Ed reports that the American University in Cairo, Middlebury College, AMIDEAST, and Butler University-affiliated Institute for Study Abroad have all announced plans to evacuate their students from Egypt this week. That strategy is a significant change from just a few days ago, when program officials predicted that that the protests would be brief.
“We’re collecting names now,” said Morgan Roth, director of communications for North America for the American University in Cairo, regarding the many students who are signing up to leave the country. She told Inside Higher Ed that the first AUC students are expected to depart Tuesday night or Wednesday.
The AUC program has about 500 American students in Cairo, of whom about 350 are study abroad. Most of the students just arrived last week for a spring semester that was scheduled to begin on Sunday. But after Egyptian authorities cut off Internet access and students’ cell phones were blocked, parents began to panic.
“A lot of the parents were desperate for information,” Roth told Inside Higher Ed. “They needed to hear where their students were, whether the military was evacuating kids, if we were going to be evacuating kids.”
According to The Washington Post, many of the students studying in Cairo attend institutions such asGeorgetown University, George Washington University and James Madison University.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that curfew restrictions in Egypt are complicating evacuation efforts. Airlines are now observing a curfew from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m., so that thousands of people trying to leave are stranded at the international airport. On Sunday, the U.S. State Department issued a travel warning recommending that Americans already in Egypt remain indoors during curfew hours, avoid demonstrations, and consider leaving as soon as they safely could.
The new warning will likely make the situation at the airport even more chaotic. “It’s already a bad situation,” noted Alex Puig in the Chronicle. He is a regional security director with International SOS, which provides health and security services for study abroad programs. “A lot of flights are being canceled because of the curfew, thousands of people are sleeping in the airport, and now a lot of people will be rushing to get onto flights on Monday. A bad situation may get a little worse.”
