After a full semester in Madrid, junior Mara Sacks had become pretty confident in her command of Spanish - but what she heard crackling through the radio on the evening of Dec. 30, 2006 required her full attention.
Sacks was on her way to the airport to begin her trip home when she heard the news: the Basque separatist organization Euzkadi ta Akatasuna (ETA) had just informed Spanish authorities that two bombs had been planted and activated in the parking lot of Terminal 4 at Barajas, Madrid's primary airport - exactly where Sacks was headed.
With such advance warning, the terminal was almost entirely evacuated, with Sacks and her traveling companions rerouted to another terminal. When the bombs detonated and killed two Ecuadorian citizens caught in the basement of a parking garage, Sacks was miles from the airport.
Yet even that was not far enough for Sacks.
"I never want to be that close to a bomb again," Sacks said. "You could see the smoke from miles away."
As a student studying abroad in Madrid, Sacks' familiarity with ETA and the issue of Basque separatism helped her understand the ordeal she experienced. "People were really shocked. It's not like this never happens, but [Madrid is] not like the Middle East; people walk around feeling safe," she said.
Sacks' experience of being present during a momentous historical event is not uncommon for students studying abroad. While classic travel tales include exotic food, attractive young foreigners and ubiquitous techno music, part of living in a foreign country is being involved, at least at a distance, with the events and experiences of the host country.
Junior Amy Spitalnick also experienced a particularly intense semester abroad. When she arrived in Jerusalem last August, Israel was in the middle of war with Lebanon. Spitalnick described the entire city as "packed with refugees who had come south because of the war."
"Security was at its highest level, with constant security advisories going out to avoid certain areas because of potential suicide bombings," she said.
Given the scale of the war, many young people were involved. "So many Israelis I know were called up from reservist duty to serve. One of our RAs was called up and he just had to drop everything to go," Spitalnick said.
Being so close to that many Israelis gave Spitalnick a distinct sense of what it was like to function in such conditions. "The threat [of bombings or military attacks] is something Israelis live with 24 hours a day, seven days a week," she said.
Student and youth involvement in current events can also lead to abroad students' inclusion in current events. Senior Shervin Dhanani was a junior when he spent two eventful semesters in Paris. In the fall, the entire world was rocked by the social and political implications of religious and racial minorities violently rioting in the suburbs, while the spring was marked by university students protesting government actions and shutting down universities for nearly two months.
"I remember taking the Metro to class every week and having a blockade of students stop me at the entrance and not allow anyone in," Dhanani said. Although he once got caught in tear gas, Dhanani tried to use these events as opportunities to interact with French students and come to better understand the issues.
"My feelings on the matter were of understanding in the beginning, but frustration as the strikes went on. What annoyed me most was that the students were disrupting their own education, which [is] essentially free and provided for by the state," he said.
Santiago, Chile is another city in which strikes and protests, particularly led by students, are hard to avoid. Yet on Dec. 10, 2006, the city was in even greater chaos than usual. General Augusto Pinochet, the 91-year-old former Chilean dictator who was arrested and prosecuted in 1998 by the Chilean government for committing gross atrocities throughout his 17-year reign, died of natural causes, causing thousands of Chileans on all sides of the political spectrum to take to the streets in an effort to express themselves.
Junior Will Kent was living in a wealthy area in Chile with a family he knew were Pinochet supporters. When the news hit the airwaves, Kent immediately left to see the public's reaction.
"Hospital Militar, where [Pinochet] died, is four blocks from my house, so I went there first," Kent said. "They had closed down all of the streets because they were filled with people. There everyone was breaking out into the pro-Pinochet chant and wearing stickers on their heads that said 'Pinochet is my hero.'"
Kent then went to the center of the city, where the crowd was twice as big, but with a very different tone. "It was all celebratory. Everyone had a bottle of champagne in their hands, [and] people were throwing confetti from the skyscrapers. Lots [of people] had big posters with pictures of missing relatives and Chilean flags," he said.
Kent said that the time he spent studying in Chile during the previous semester helped give him a better understanding of the demonstrators.
"Nobody here would understand it the way those of us who studied there did. They just miss the context, the constant saturation of the history and the issues in the news, listening to firsthand accounts of everything that went on," he said. "All of that made the experience that much more powerful and that much more vivid."
