After being grounded more than 30 hours at an airport in Egypt, a University of Cincinnati senior studying abroad apparently left the country Monday night.
David Watkins, 21, of Sidney, Ohio, was waiting to board a charter flight from Alexandria, Egypt, to Prague at 10:30 p.m. Egyptian time (3:30 p.m. EST).
His mother, Julie Watkins of Sidney, had talked with her son about those travel plans when he called her earlier in the day. When she returned home from work Monday, she discovered an e-mail from Butler University confirming the plane had taken off. Watkins was studying at Alexandria University through Butler University in Indianapolis.
Still, she won’t be satisfied until she talks with her son.
“I’m hoping that’s true,” she said of the e-mail. “At this point, it’s difficult to know exactly what’s happening, because plans have changed.”
He was scheduled to board a flight for Athens eight hours earlier Monday.
“We were supposed to be on a plane coming from Cairo with other American students,” Watkins said earlier Monday. “But that plane got delayed in Cairo. We had heard that the government grounded the plane or that the pilot had said, ‘I’m done for today.’
“We’re still at the Alexandria airport. We’ve gone back and forth between terminals and security … I can see the gate, which is the closest we’ve been.”
Watkins is the only UC student studying abroad in Egypt, but he’s not the only student from an area college there. Miami University has two students enrolled at The American University in Cairo.
“We are in contact with their parents,” said Carole Johnson, assistant director of news and public information at Miami University. “We are on an automatic notification list when they actually get wherever they’re going to go. I think they’re still on standby. They haven’t left yet.”
Miami declined to release the students’ names.
An emergency announcement posted Sunday on The American University’s website said: “We anticipate that the U.S. government will facilitate an authorized departure for Americans, who elect to leave. Therefore, we will be notifying people with the details as quickly and expeditiously as possible. Residents are secure and faculty, staff and students are safe.”
Watkins arrived in Egypt on Jan. 20 for the study program, which was to last until May 27. He had counted on the immersion experience in Egypt, where he was going to be studying Arabic. That was integral to his career goal of working for the U.S. government in the Department of Defense or Homeland Security, his mother said.
“He is very disappointed in having to leave,” she said. “He just did not want to go, but realized there was no other option.”
Watkins, who is studying political science and international affairs at UC, is in Egypt with a group of American college students. Their charter flight to Prague was arranged by Middlebury College in Vermont and Butler University. He had tweeted that he was going to Prague on a State Department flight, but it was unclear whether the plane had taken off.
“I’m frustrated,” Watkins said. “We’ve been at the same airport for over 30 hours trying to leave the country. We’ve been back and forth between two terminals and between buses.
“We get on a bus and they say. ‘We’re going to take your luggage on another bus. It will be easier.’ They tell us to close the blinds between terminals. Can we just leave already?” On Sunday, Watkins spent the night drifting in and out of sleep while resting on a line of four chairs.
“We’ve been living off of potato chips and candy bars,” he said. “We had a couple of resident directors from Butler who brought us our groceries. They brought us our bread, cheese, juice and milk. We had that for breakfast. Now, we’re getting some croissants at the gate.”
In Highland Heights, a group of Northern Kentucky University students just returned from Egypt.
About a dozen students taking a history course spent two weeks there, said Beth Lorenz, NKU study abroad adviser. The group of 26 included faculty and community members.
Students and faculty visited sites related to their class in Aswan, Cairo and Luxor. The group left for Egypt Dec. 26 and returned Jan. 7, weeks before protests and violence erupted. At that time, there was no sign of the danger to come.
“While you’re there, you can see the effects of the political system,” Lorenz said. “You can see how it affects the people and how they interact. It wasn’t dangerous.”
