My recent travels brought me back to the U.S. with a group of 20 AUS students. I and two other faculty members in the International Studies Department accompanied these students to Boston, where they participated in the Harvard Model United Nations. What an adventure it was for us all, and quite a learning experience for our students.
To begin, we were all booked as a group on a flight from Dubai to Washington, and then from Washington to Boston. But this was during the blizzards that hit D.C. and the east coast during February. So we woke up on our day of departure to find out that the flight from Dubai to Washington had been canceled, and that we all had been broken up into separate flights. Given that the three of us faculty members were responsible for accompanying the students, this was clearly not going to work. So I spent that day getting us all booked onto the same Swiss Air flight to Zurich and then to Boston. Great!
Well, after a series of additional mishaps between that point and Zurich that I won't go into, we did in fact arrive in Switzerland at approximately 5 in the morning. Our departure for Boston was at 9 that night. Great! A free day in Zurich right? Wrong. Because of where most of our students are from (around the Middle East and South Asia), they needed a Schengen Visa to get into Zurich. And of course, given that we did not ever plan on being in Europe, we had not gotten those. No problem. We could just hang out at the airport, wander around the shops, and eat at the restaurants for the day, right? Wrong. The students needed a Schengen Visa to enter the main part of the airport as well.
So we all remained in a lame corner area of the airport for the day, watching as flight after flight to the U.S. was canceled, awaiting our ultimate notification that ours was too. Without going into the grueling details of what transpired once our flight was canceled, the bottom line is that we got booked on the same flight out at 9 pm the next night and were placed in the political asylum dorm with other refugees. That's right. We stayed in the asylum. I had the pleasure of sharing a bunk bed with a Serbian refugee from Kosovo. I shudder to imagine what this guy was running away from. But there we were...
Eventually we did make it to Boston though. Of course, there was not a flake of snow on the ground. Thanks to the mayor for the unnecessary state of emergency having heard that there might be a snow storm.
Once there, the students really did have a great experience. I think that the most rewarding thing to see was the transition from a high level of anxiety among our students as they were preparing for their first session. They were clearly intimidated by the idea that they were going to go in and engage in debates with these kids from Harvard and other Ivy League schools. We told them not to worry, just to go and do their thing. And when they returned from that first session, the transformation was amazing. They came to us excitedly describing how they were so much more prepared than those other students. "The don't know what they're talking about." We told them to let that be a lesson never to be intimidated just because of a name. I think that this alone was worth the trip.
The final thing that I will say is that these kids are truly amazing. They dealt with the difficulties and disappointments (and trust me, some of them are not accustomed to slumming it like we did) with fantastic attitudes. I was so proud to take them to the program, and hope that we are able to again next year.
