Due to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa this year, several students’ trips overseas were cut short this summer. In August, the University released a statement advising Stanford travelers to avoid West Africa and to return home if they were visiting the area.

The Bing Overseas Study Program canceled a planned summer seminar in Ghana and the Haas Center for Public Service recalled students who were interning in the area.

“The Haas Center worked with the University to evacuate all students, including six summer fellows, from West African countries due to the outbreak of the Ebola virus,” wrote Megan Swezey Fogarty, deputy director of Stanford University’s Haas Center for Public Service, in a statement to The Daily. “The decision was less about the possibility of infection as it was about potential disruption to medical and transportation infrastructure were the disease to spread further into unaffected countries.”

Mina Shah ’16, who was working in Ghana with the West African AIDS Foundation, explained that she received an email from the Haas Center around three weeks before she was supposed to go home.

“The subject line was ‘exit Africa order,’ and [the email] basically just explained that they thought it was in our best interest to come home early and shorten our stays,” Shah said. “I was probably going to stay [in Ghana], but the next day they sent a follow-up email saying that they had changed their minds and made it mandatory.”

Shah explained that she was surprised about the decision since there were still two-country buffers between her location and the infected regions.

“The urgency of the emails that were sent seemed to not match the urgency of the situation where I was,” Shah said.

“With my interactions with people I was living around and shop-owners in the area, you would never know that anything was wrong,” she added.

Shah also wished she had had more time to prepare for the “reverse culture shock” of returning home.

“I understand [why the University] did what they did,” Shah said. “But I wish I had the extra time in Ghana to prepare for coming back. I’ve had a really hard time being back in the states. I think a lot of that has to do with not having adequate time to prepare myself for being back.”

Christine Chen ’17 also left Ghana two weeks early as a precaution against the Ebola outbreak.  Chen had been working with Kaeme, an organization that partners with the Ghanaian Department of Social Welfare to survey orphanages.  Although not affiliated with Stanford, Kaeme made its decision to leave Ghana early since six of its interns were Stanford students.

“We had heard that [Stanford was] pulling people out,” Chen said. “It wasn’t just Stanford that were pulling people out – a lot of other universities were too.”

The first case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States was confirmed today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at a hospital in Dallas, Texas. The infected individual left Liberia on Sept. 19 and had no symptoms before boarding the flight back to the U.S.

“I have no doubt that we will control this case of Ebola so that it does not spread widely in this country,” said CDC director Tom Frieden at a news conference.

 

Contact Kylie Jue at kyliej ‘at’ stanford.edu.