Passport to knowledge

New Crisis, The, Sep/Oct 2001 by Gaines, Alayna A

"I could have taken all my classes at the Sorbonne, but I wasn't all that brave," she says.

"I did better [grade-wise] than I anticipated. I didn't think I knew as much French as I did, and so I didn't expect to do very [well]... but I ended up with A's and B's."

Duke, Spelman and Lincoln are among the approximately 200 schools tied to the Council on International Educational Exchange, a study-abroad provider. The 54-year-old organization runs programs for students to enroll directly in foreign institutions. It also manages about 60 semester, summer and year-long programs of its own, known as Council Study Centers.

According to Jennifer Tidwell, the New York City-based council's manager of communications and research, in 19981999 about 2,135 students traveled abroad in its programs; about 4 percent were African American. The council works closely with several HBCUs, she says, in particular Spelman and Morehouse colleges and Clark Atlanta University. It also facilitates an international scholarship by ExxonMobil for faculty from HBCUs. Since 1997, 31 faculty or administrators from HBCUs have participated in International Faculty Development Seminars (IFDS), Tidwell says.

But studying abroad for African Americans is more than an opportunity to observe another culture. Often by their mere presence, it's also a chance to share their experiences as Black Americans, and to counter the frequent negative images that get exported via mass media.

In 1991, Robyn Pretlow, for example, studied in Egypt, during the fall semester of her senior year, at the American University in Cairo. The Duke University student majoring in comparative areas studied Ibin Khaldun, a Middle Eastern philosopher; Islamic art and architecture; political science and Arabic.

Pretlow fell in love with the Middle East, having traveled to Israel and Egypt as a teenager with Legacy International of Bedford, Va. At times, she says it was easy to interact because she wasn't white, and some Middle Easterners thought she was Sudanese.

"They never really realized where I was from. I went after the Persian Gulf War, so there was a little animosity toward white American students."

But she also remembers how she and other African American females sometimes received racist comments from Egyptians.

"Your skin is as dirty as the bottom of my shoe," she recalls one person saying. Pretlow also found the strict attitudes toward women repressive.

"If you're out [late] walking, [the police] would assume you're a prostitute, a street walker. I was stopped several times, alone and in groups," says Pretlow, who was 21 at the time. She would produce her U.S. passport and then would be left alone.

She also found it amusing that while she and the other women tried to be respectful of Islamic culture and wear long-sleeve shirts and pants, the Middle Eastern women - when on school grounds - would emulate Western culture by wearing Lycra shorts and halter tops.

"They'd laugh at the clothes we were wearing," she says.

Andre Foster waited until he finished undergraduate school to go overseas. The 1998 graduate of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville participated in Single European Market, a six-week program of the American Institute of Foreign Study. Studying the monetary function of the Euro dollar, he traveled to London for two weeks, spent a week in Paris, then went to Lucerne, Switzerland; Brussels and Berlin.