The U.S. Department of State’s travel advisory for Thailand is grounding 18 Northwestern students who planned to travel to the country this June as part of their Reporting and Connecting with Immigrant Communities class.
The student journalists were planning to report on the living situations in the refugee camps of the Chiang Mai province. NU maintains a policy of not operating, funding, supervising or directing programs in countries where a Department of State Travel Warning is in effect.
Medill Prof. Jack Doppelt began teaching the course last year. Spring 2010 is the third quarter it has been offered.
Each term, the course has focused on new aspects of immigrant life in Chicago, Doppelt said. This spring he decided the class would feature refugees in its coverage.
Students were tasked with profiling immigrants. The subjects chosen by this term’s class represent eight different nations, from Guatemala to Tibet, Doppelt said.
When planning the class, he said each immigrant’s story would be told in three parts. These would include the persecution a refugee faced in the country of origin, their time spent in either a refugee camp or hiding and their resettlement in or around Chicago.
“In the States, the media doesn’t really focus on refugee camps at all,” Doppelt said. “It is part of the world that is really forgotten.”
As the quarter began, Doppelt said colleagues approached him suggesting his students visit refugee camps in their profile subjects’ home nations.
“Even getting the stories from immigrants is a step removed,” he said. “I thought this was a great idea, and I walked into the first day of class and talked it out with the students.”
Students chose their profile subjects by the middle of the quarter and the discussion of visiting refugee camps turned to where the class would go, Doppelt said. At first, Doppelt had hoped the class would split into several groups to visit different countries, based on where each immigrant profiled was from.
“A lot of countries in the world, particularly where we were interested in going, were on the State Department watch list,” he said.
Additionally, many refugees from places like Cambodia and Palestine were 30 to 40 years removed from their refugee experiences, and the likelihood was slim that the camps they had lived in still existed.
Ultimately, the class settled on Thailand.
Medill senior Mallory Gafas spent the quarter profiling Leon Lin, a Cambodian refugee who immigrated to America in 1981 after spending five years in the Cambodian killing fields during the Cambodian genocide and two years in a refugee camp.
Gafas said she has been following the situation in Thailand as it unfolds.
“It’s interesting in that there aren’t a lot of Thai refugees because there never has been much conflict in the country until now,” she said. “But part of the reason I wanted to go to Thailand is that there are a lot of Cambodian refugees there.”
In addition to its range of refugees, Thailand was a strong choice because of a contact Doppelt found in a young Thai immigrant at North Park University who planned to travel with a group of students a few weeks prior to the Medill class trip.
Last Tuesday, the class received the final word on a $40,000 grant for their trip from Medill and the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies and began to finalize its itinerary, said Medill junior Christina Rosales, a student in the class.
But news broke Thursday of the assassination attempt against a general and ally of the protest movement raging in Bangkok, the nation’s capital.
“Things escalated in Thailand so that by Friday students and their parents were becoming concerned,” Doppelt said. “I began to write a memo to students and administrators that I think we are safe because the travel advisory was only for Bangkok and the airport at that point.”
Doppelt said he woke up Saturday to the news that the State Department’s travel advisory had expanded to a State of Emergency in 17 provinces, including Chiang Mai.
Tuesday’s class marked the formal cancellation of the trip. Doppelt said he is already considering options for a trip to follow next fall’s class including some students from this quarter.
Ideally, he would like to send groups of students to three different countries but have them report on something similar.
Rosales, who has one year left at NU, said she would definitely be interested in the trip next December.
“I would really like to send students to three countries and have them reporting in real time, from various parts of the world over the course of the same week to see what people in these three different settings are doing,” Doppelt said. “Maybe it’s three children being educated. What is it like at two in the afternoon? What is it like at four?”
