American colleges were struggling to extract—and, in some cases, even reach—students, and faculty and staff members studying and traveling in Haiti in the wake of a deadly earthquake there Tuesday, a task made more difficult by the extent of the devastation and by already poor infrastructure in the Caribbean nation
At least two institutions—Lynn University and the University of Florida—had students or employees yet to be accounted for, as of Wednesday evening.
Meanwhile, few details were available about the impact of the natural disaster on Haitian universities. A photograph circulating on news wires shows a man trapped in rubble at the University of Port-au-Prince, and American academics with ties to Haiti said they had not been able to make contact with colleagues at the main university there, the State University of Haiti.
Officials at Lynn University, in Florida, were still trying to determine the fate of several of the 12 students and two faculty members in Haiti for a weeklong service-learning trip.
A Lynn student had received a text message from a friend on Tuesday evening, shortly after the quake, indicating that some members of the group were safe, said Jason Hughes, a spokesman for the university, during a conference call with reporters. Seven students also made contact with their parents through the U.S. embassy there.
But Mr. Hughes said Wednesday afternoon that the university has not been able to reach either the students or their faculty chaperones.
“At this point, there is no substantive information,” he said, “which is not what we want.”
The group had arrived in Haiti on Monday to work with a nonprofit group, Food for the Poor, and was scheduled to leave on Friday. Lynn officials were working with the international-aid group to try to locate the students.
A rescue group from Food for the Poor had apparently gotten within a mile of the hotel where the students were staying, Mr. Hughes said, but had been stopped by severe damage.
Lynn also is working with a company that provides travel insurance and overseas medical and safety assistance to colleges to find the students and pull them from the country.
The University of Florida has tracked down two faculty members who arrived in Haiti over the weekend, working on a grant through the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, focused on agribusiness. One of the professors contacted his wife to say they were safe, said Steve Orlando, a university spokesman.
But Florida has not been able to reach two graduate students in journalism who were in Haiti to work on a documentary about building a school in the country. The last information officials have is that the students were at an orphanage outside of Port-au-Prince.
Administrators at Blue Ridge Community College, in Virginia, had no news until Wednesday evening on four people who had traveled to Haiti as part of a program by a nonprofit organization called SIFE. The college spent a nerve-wracking day trying to reach the group through text messages and phone calls, and sharing information with people who had contacts in Haiti, when an American volunteer e-mailed her organization late in the day to say the four were with her and safe.
The group, comprising two students, a faculty member, and a staff member, was staying in Rivière Froide, located about 20 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince. The team traveled to Haiti to help local residents gain business experience through developing rabbit farms.
Bridget Baylor, a college spokesperson, said that the institution, which does not have a study-abroad program, did not have an emergency plan unique to overseas travel. She said that while the college had copies of the students’ passports, release forms, and emergency contact information, officials were operating in “uncharted territory.”
“We’re using our current emergency-response plan as much as we can,” she said. This is obviously a very different situation. We’re communicating with the families in as timely of a manner as we can.”
Managing Risk Abroad
Haiti illustrates the significant obstacles colleges can face in sending students and faculty members to developing nations. Severe hurricanes in recent years have battered the island nation’s already subpar infrastructure, and poverty and political instability make it a difficult location in which to operate.
In fact, relatively few colleges have programs in Haiti, as the U.S. Department of State warns against unnecessary travel to the country because of unrest there.
“It’s a challenging place to be in the first place,” said Gary M. Rhodes, director of the Center for Global Education at Loyola Marymount University and an expert on health and safety in study abroad.
The severity of the devastation—in particular, the impact on communications networks and on travel in and to the country—present further difficulties.
Mr. Rhodes, whose Los Angeles-based organization supports an online clearinghouse for information about health and safety in education abroad, said the disaster illustrates the importance of having a plan in place to deal with overseas crises.
Colleges need to have clear and consistent procedures in place specifying the actions that study-abroad leaders and officials on campus will take should an incident occur, Mr. Rhodes said. The plan should detail appropriate steps, including meeting places in case of disaster, a communications tree for conveying critical information, and a crisis-management team that includes risk managers, study-abroad directors, and student-affairs experts, among others. Colleges also need to provide training to both faculty leaders and to student participants traveling overseas, he said.
Many colleges also will contract with emergency-assistance providers, he said.
A two-man security and medical detail from one such health and safety company, International SOS, was already on its way on Wednesday afternoon into Haiti by helicopter from neighboring Dominican Republic, said John Rendeiro, vice president for global security and intelligence. The team will assess the situation on the ground.
The biggest challenges will be security and medical care, Mr. Rendeiro said. The company contracts with medical providers around the world, but much of the capacity in Haiti is probably degraded, and many of the injured may need to be flown out of the country for treatment. That will be especially challenging because of heavy damage to the capital’s main airport.
Within hours of the tremor, the company had set up in Philadelphia a 24-hour crisis-management team of aviation, logistics, medical, and security experts, which is providing regular updates to its corporate and higher-education clients. It currently has 50 active cases in Haiti, including 10 from colleges, Mr. Rendeiro said.
Laura Angelone, International SOS’s director of scholastic programs, said it has accounted for between 20 and 25 students or college employees now in Haiti. Most are working with public-health programs, she said.
Some universities with faculty and students in Haiti got good news fairly quickly in the day.
Rob Howell, director of international academic programs at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said five engineering students and an adviser working in a rural area about 70 miles north of Port-au-Prince were safe. The group, from Engineers Without Borders, were working on a hydroelectric power-generation facility in Bayonnais.
“We are OK,” the students posted on their blog. “Don’t worry, it was a mere tremor here.”
The biggest challenge, Mr. Howell said, may be getting the students, who were scheduled to depart this Friday, back to Madison.
The University of Notre Dame confirmed the safety of four faculty and staff members who were in Port-au-Prince at the time of the earthquake, according to Dennis Brown, a university spokesman. They are involved in the university’s Haiti Program, which is working to eliminate the debilitating disease lymphatic filariasis.
The program is based about 20 miles west of Port-au-Prince, but the four people were in the capital for a meeting at the time of the earthquake. The Rev. Thomas G. Streit, the program director, contacted the program’s campus liaison immediately following the earthquake to relay that the group, along with a recent graduate working with it, was safe.
But further efforts to contact Father Streit have failed, according to Mr. Brown.
Notre Dame has plans in place for emergencies abroad, Mr. Brown said, but the situation is unique because communication channels are down.
The school keeps on file the contact information for people participating in study-abroad programs and service trips, and participants have emergency contact information for the appropriate campus official.
Mr. Brown said that a campus international-crisis management team met this morning to discuss the situation.
According to Mark Owczarski, a Virginia Tech spokesman, a group of five faculty members and graduate students are in the country on a USAID grant. The group is working in the Haitian countryside to assist local farmers in developing sustainable agriculture.
Virginia Tech was able to “briefly confirm” the safety of the group Tuesday evening when one of the faculty members was able to communicate via Skype, according to Mr. Owczarski.
Helping Out
The earthquake is just the latest blow to befall a country that has been hit hard by violence, civil unrest, and natural disaster, said J. Christopher Kovats-Bernat, an associate professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College, who has been doing research on children and violence in Haiti for the last 15 years.
“I’m angry that it’s suddenly that disaster happens in Haiti when this is just another degree of the disaster already happening in this country,” he said.
S. Blair Hedges, a professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, said none of his e-mail messages to Haitian colleagues have been returned, “but that is no surprise because certainly the Internet is not functioning there at this moment. It may be some days before word gets back about survivors.”
Mr. Hedges was last in Port-au-Prince in November to do biodiversity work and said, in an e-mail message, that he had learned that the hotel where he had stayed had collapsed.
Chantalle F. Verna, an assistant professor of history and international relations at Florida International University whose work has focused on U.S.-Haitian relations, said she had received news that the École Normal Supérieure, the primary institution for teacher training in the country, had suffered serious damage.
Ms. Verna, who has traveled to Haiti since 2001, said she is concerned about the impact the earthquake might have on the country’s archives and libraries, collections that “already were in a very precarious situation.”
The Haitian Education & Leadership Program, a Port-au-Prince based university-scholarship program that provides merit scholarships to top high school graduates from Haiti’s poorest areas, reported that the organization’s center, located near the downtown district, has been destroyed.
In a statement posted to the nonprofit organization’s Web site, Conor Bohan, the group’s founder, said that four staff members have been injured. But there were no reports of any deaths among students, with nearly all of the approximately 108 students affiliated with the program accounted for.
“We are praying that we can keep this winning streak going,” he said in the statement.
Mr. Bohan asked for donations to “rebuild the lives of our staff and students and our infrastructure.”
Meanwhile, universities in the United States are rallying to help.
The Harvard Gazette reported that two Harvard Medical School faculty members left for Haiti on Wednesday to assist rescue operations.
One faculty member is Joia S. Mukherjee, medical director of Partners in Health, a Harvard-affiliated, Boston-based nonprofit group with a long history of running health clinics in Haiti, among other countries. The article in the Gazette also quoted an e-mail dispatch from Louise Ivers, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who was already in Port-au-Prince. The message read: “Temporary field hospital ... needs supplies, pain meds, bandages. Please help us.”
Several doctors from the Miller School of Medicine of the University of Miami traveled to Haiti Wednesday, according to Omar Montejo, a spokesman for the medical school, which sponsors a physician training program in Haiti.
“Tomorrow or later in the week, we plan on sending additional planes as warranted,” he said.
Other colleges are reaching out financially, including Notre Dame, which has established a relief fund for earthquake victims.
Jeff Francis, a student at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., who has been involved with community service efforts in Haiti, said that he has already contacted university officials about doing a fund raiserfund-raiser for relief efforts. Mr. Francis, who works for a group called HELO (“Home, Education, Love, Opportunity”), raised $12,500 for a Haitian orphanage at Marist last March.
“For the last 20 hours, my stomach has been in my throat,” Mr. Francis said. “We did just get news that the children are all safe.”
Monica Campbell contributed to this report.
