This week The Scene International reminisces with Occupational Therapy student Dylan Shirek, who last spring went in search of a unique study abroad experience in Uganda; and with Arts & Sciences junior Bidong Tot, who returned to Ethiopia this summer to visit his parents, who he hadn’t seen since coming to America when he was 11.

From illegally crossing the border of Uganda and Sudan, to watching a relative die from lack of medical treatment in an Ethiopian hospital, two Creighton students experienced East Africa intimately this past spring and summer. The experience, both terrifying and deeply rewarding, left both appreciating life in America, yet eager to return.

Shirek’s three months in Africa were the first he spent out of the country.

“I didn’t really know what to expect,” Shirek said.

There being only 30 students in his study abroad program through School for International Training, Shirek stood out wherever he went.

“At first it was strange to have everyone always staring at me or calling out “mzungu” [white person], but after a while I just got used to it,” Shirek said.

For the first six weeks, Shirek took classes in the southern Ugandan city of Kampala, and lived outside of the city in a village named Lubowa by himself with a Ugandan family.

“It was very cool being able to live with a family for so long. I became comfortable with them immediately,” Shirek said.

After Shirek’s classes were completed, he spent the following six weeks doing a practicum project at the Reproductive Health Uganda clinic in the northern Ugandan city of Lira. It was during his time in Lira that Shirek met a Ugandan woman named Kathy with whom he decided, “on a whim,” to travel to Sudan.

Though the U.S. travel warning for Sudan was high, Shirek decided the time was right to try anyway.

Flat tires, Internally Displaced People camps on the side of the roads, and the constant fear of the armed rebel Lords Resistance Army plagued the 11-hour bus ride from Lira to Juba, Sudan.

Shirek was able to bribe the Ugandan boarder guards to let him out of the country, but while in “no man’s land” between Uganda and Sudan, he realized he had no visa, and only a copy of his passport.

“I was told by a Sudanese man to hide on the back of the bus while we waited at the border crossing into Sudan,” Shirek said.

A border guard found Shirek on the bus and forced him into an immigration office where a Sudanese man from the bus helped him get through the border.

Once in Sudan, Shirek and Kathy looked for a place to stay, but found all the rooms too expensive. Instead, they went to stay at the home of the Sudanese man they met on the bus.

“When we woke up the next day, we realized we were on an army compound, and the man was in the Sudanese Army.”

Shirek spent the day seeing Juba, but decided at night it was best to return to Uganda.

“Once I got back to Uganda, all of my initial feelings of being uncomfortable there were gone. It was a feeling of being back at home,” Shirek said.

Tot, too, shared Shirek’s feelings of being at home when he returned to Ethiopia over the summer.

“It was kind of unbelievable being back in Ethiopia; my parents didn’t think they would ever see any of us again,” Tot said.

Because of the war and poverty, Tot’s family, who originally lived in Sudan, sent Tot to a school and refugee camp in Ethiopia run by the United Nations.

“My father was a farmer in Sudan, and he wanted a better life for me,” Tot said.

Along with three older brothers and a sister, Tot was sent to live in the United States in 1999.

During the first week of Tot’s homecoming this summer, he relived in part what it was like living at the refugee camps when his cousin fell ill with malaria and he and his uncle had to take her to the hospital.

“The hospital was in really bad shape. There was only one doctor working alone, and there were just big rooms full of people. You had to pay for everything a doctor would use when he was treating you, like new gloves,” Tot said.

Though Tot’s cousin was not cured at the hospital, she was sent home.

“It seemed like they didn’t do anything to my cousin, and she couldn’t even respond. And she didn’t make it, she passed away,” Tot said.

Along with his cousin’s death, Tot was deeply moved by the other people he talked to and helped in the hospital.

“It’s different when you see it with your own eyes, you deeply feel it. I can’t describe it to other people,” Tot said.

Though he has no immediate plans to return, Tot says it is certain he will, once he finishes up school and has a stable job. “I want to go back not as just a visitor next time, I want to go and help out,” Tot said.