Pitt students in study abroad program to leave Cairo

The last of five Pitt students meant to spend the semester in Cairo is scheduled to leave Egypt… The last of five Pitt students meant to spend the semester in Cairo is scheduled to leave Egypt from suburbs outside the city today. The other four boarded a plane to Istanbul yesterday.

Lawrence Feick, director of the University Center for International Studies, confirmed that all Pitt students in the Cairo program have left or are planning to leave Egypt. The five Pitt students embarked at the end of January for their prospective study abroad at the American University in Cairo, where they expected to begin classes this week.

Mass protests and violence — which have resulted in several dozen deaths across the county—  pushed the start date for classes to Feb. 13. The Egyptian government shut down communication lines late last week, limiting communication via e-mail and phone. Pitt students were able to communicate using cell phones, Feick said.

Yesterday morning, four of the five Pitt students —all participating in a program at American University in Cairo — left on a bus to go to the airport outside Cairo, Feick said. The fifth student opted to stay and wait until today to depart.

The bus trip lasted about 20 minutes and the passengers were reported to have safely gotten to the airport.

At 10 p.m. in Cairo yesterday — 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time — the four students safely boarded a plane headed to Istanbul. Feick said that the destination would allow for easy travel to other airports.

Four of the students on Pitt’s program were supposed to study on the island of Zamalek, located in the middle of the Nile River right where it splits Cairo in two, and one had planned to study in New Cairo, about 40 minutes from the extreme violence in downtown Cairo.

Feick said that the University recognized these students as adults who had the right to stay in the Egyptian city, but impressed upon the students and their families that the University would like them to voluntarily leave.

It now appears that these Pitt students will not be studying abroad in Cairo at all. How the five will finish their semester — once they have safely left Cairo — is unclear.

Feick is working with Jeff Whitehead, the interim co-director of Pitt’s Study Abroad Office, and the American University in Cairo program coordinators to safely bring these students home or find them alternative Pitt-related study abroad programs that have later start dates.

Feick said that it is not academically feasible that the students will be able to resume the semester at Pitt because classes are so far along, but assured that the University will work with student on an individual basis to see what is best for them.

He mentioned that students who do not find a suitable a Pitt program or other study-abroad program might be able to attend a college with a later semester start-date and then receive transfer credits from Pitt.

Pitt UCIS follows the State Department’s guidelines when implementing study-abroad programs and heeds the department’s recommendations, Feick said. The state department last updated its travel warning for Egypt yesterday, recommending that “U.S. citizens avoid travel to Egypt due to ongoing political and social unrest.”

Feick said that the recommendation put the future of Pitt’s study-abroad program there in doubt, at least for this semester.

“Future Pitt students will not go back to the AUC program until we are confident that the situation dies down,” Feick said. “But we think AUC has done a great job managing a pretty serious situation.”

Morgan Roth, a spokeswoman for the American University in Cairo, said that the U.S. State Department has offered transportation for voluntary departure and that a number of students have decided that they want to leave.

Once they get to a safe haven in Istanbul, Athens or Cyprus, it is up to students and their families to decide what they want to do — whether that involves sitting it out and waiting or making other plans to go back to the U.S., Roth said.

Roth also said that some families have not yet been able to contact their children due to communication restrictions.

“There is sporadic Internet access and very limited e-mail access,” Roth said. “Nobody that I Skype with in Cairo is Skyping. Mobile phones are now operating, which is how we are communicating — via text messaging or calling on mobile phones. The land lines are working so for a while we were allowing students to use land lines and giving them phone cards to call home. But we had to restrict their calling time to one minute, just enough time to let students inform their families about what is going on.”

She added that there are less than a dozen phones at the university for more than 300 students to use, but it is the best option the school could offer at the time.

“Everybody wanted that peace of mind about hearing that voice on the other end,” Roth said.

The families that have not contacted their children are looking for practical and logistical information, and reassurances that the AUC won’t leave their children stranded anywhere. Roth said that AUC coordinated the travel of the five Pitt students, along with Pitt.

“Parents were worried about a lot of rumors,” Roth said. “They saw the worst possible rumors on TV and wanted to reconcile their children’s safety with the reality of the situation.”

The AUC has housing in two locations at two campuses.

There are university buildings near the violence in downtown Cairo at Tahrir, but these are mostly administrative facilities.

The main campus is in a suburb called New Cairo about 40 minutes from the downtown violence. It houses about 400 students, one of which was a Pitt student.

The other dormitory is on Zamalek and houses an additional 230 students, four of whom were Pitt students.

To access Zamalek, students have to take a bridge across the Nile. Several days ago, Roth said that police closed that bridge.

There were no reports of violence on Zamalek until the second or third day of protest when the police presence diminished and there were reports of looting, Roth said. The military moved in quickly and set up an army tank just outside of a dormitory.

Additionally, the dormitories are highly secured and both Roth and Feick said the Pitt students were safe and away from the violence. Students were not permitted to travel outside of the secure dormitory sites, Feick said.

Roth added that students have not yet reported any violence near their dormitories.