Here is a list:
* In 1996, four American students were killed in a bus crash in India. The group, in the University of Pittsburgh’s vaunted Semester at Sea program, was supposed to take a plane on the trip, but organizers changed the plan at the last minute. The bus driver was drunk and had been working for more than 24 hours. The students’ families have sued the university.
* In 1997, Ohio State University student Shawn Wight died of complications after suffering altitude sickness on a glacier in the Himalayas, and being left at high altitude for 10 days. The expedition was run by a university professor. Wight’s parents are suing the school.
* In 1997, a group from tiny Indiana Wesleyan University was in Cambodia during political strife. A bomb exploded a block from them. The group caught the last plane out of Phnom Penh before the airport was shut down by fighting. The U.S. State Department had warned Americans to avoid Cambodia.
* In 1998, a bus load of students from St. Mary’s College in Maryland was stopped by bandits along a road in Guatemala. Five female students were raped. It happened in an area where there had been numerous reports of highway bandits.
* In March 1999, Elizabeth Garland, an anthropology student at the University of Chicago, nearly died when Hutu rebels kidnapped and killed eight of her party in the jungles of Uganda. The Peace Corps had pulled its volunteers out of Uganda in 1991 and kept them out, saying it could not ensure the safety of its workers there.
Disturbing recent incidents include the brutal slayings of Emily Eagen of Ann Arbor and her friend, Emily Howell of Lexington, Ky., in Costa Rica in March. Howell, a student at Antioch College in Ohio, and Eagen, her friend and a former Antioch student, were abducted and killed in an area of Costa Rica known for drug trafficking and crime.
