Let's play

Advisors continuously say to me, Lauren, I think CIEE has a great program in Buenos Aires. Lauren, why don’t you study with a provider, check out our options? They wonder why I insist on doing an exchange for my spring semester. The article linked here is why: because I am an American, I must be protected. Check out this NYT headline: “8 American Tourists Killed in a Bus Crash in Egypt”

The first time I studied abroad, I paid a US-based provider to cart me around Durban, South Africa for six weeks. They seemed to think our agreement was for them to bring me apples when my tummy hurt, and for me to sit in a padded bubble in the corner of their Cato Manor office, content as a dog getting its belly rubbed. I did see human-sized bubbles at a family center in Durban, but it probably would have cost me a contract breach with my provider to have taken it for a spin.

Yes, I had to sign many contracts with SIT Study Abroad to enroll in their summer program, including agreeing to limit my freedom in South Africa. Read this contract excerpt from their Conditions of Participation document:

Certain activities deemed potentially dangerous to individual safety and program integrity are not permitted and are grounds for dismissal. These include, but are not limited to, motorcycling, hitchhiking, driving, parachuting, bungee-jumping, hang-gliding, riding in private airplanes, rock climbing, white water rafting, and scuba diving. Independent travel during the program is limited and restricted.

Basically, with their “but not limited too” clause, SIT had to contract me to study with them and avoid any activity that could so much give me a boo-boo on my knee, lest my parents and American newspapers would defame them. With a reputation for crime, drugs, and unculturedness spreading through World Cup gossip, a few injured American tourists were not what South Africa needed in 2010.

Take this study abroad provider as a paradigm for the general treatment I face as a US tourist in any county. People treat me like glass—they don’t want to be the one to break Uncle Sam’s precious heirloom. And I have to try twice as hard to win any person’s state of comfort in my presence.

So I just want to say to New York Times, CNN, for posting headlines like “8 American Tourists Killed in a Bus Crash in Egypt” without care to the “21 others” who suffered similar fates, you make being a US tourist a pain in the ass.

When I study abroad next semester I’m direct enrolling, and saying I’m from Toronto.