The Wagon

In international education, we describe our responsibility to students in expansive terms: crossing borders, navigating unfamiliar systems, building belonging far from home. We advise on immigration status, housing, health insurance, academics, employment, cultural adjustment, and the thousand practical details that make an international education possible.

We also ask families to trust us. They trust that someone will notice when a student is struggling, that someone will know what to do in an emergency. Parents put their children on airplanes and send them to a campus they have never seen, based partly on faith that the institution receiving them will take care of them.

Most days that responsibility is an undercurrent. Then something terrible happens, and the weight of it cannot be ignored. Loss and injury are not hypothetical in this field. When they come, each one carries its own circumstances, its own family, its own friendships, its own grief.

There is the professional work that must be done. There is the grief. There is very little space between them.

When a tragedy happens, the teamwork begins immediately.

Families must be contacted. Immigration records may require attention. Insurance companies, consulates, funeral homes, coroners, hospitals. When the student is international, arrangements become a cross-border matter.

The family may be thousands of miles away, trying to make sense of the tragedy in a language and legal system that are not their own. They may need visas to travel here. They may need help retrieving belongings, understanding a university's procedures, bringing their child home. They may not believe the news. They may be subject to a travel ban.

Every detail matters, and almost every detail hurts.

Information must be confirmed before it is shared. Privacy must be protected. Cultural and religious practices must be understood, not assumed. Decisions need to be made quickly and never carelessly. During a crisis, professionalism looks like discipline in service of a family at the worst moment of their lives, not detachment.

We knew these students. We saw them at orientation, in advising appointments, at ordinary moments that did not seem important until they became memories. Somewhere between organizing a response and answering the next question is the fact that someone who was part of our community is gone.

On my desk, a file with a name on it. Beside it, a small wagon of belongings, evidence of a life. Donations to the church. Letters from friends. A passport.

Families have entrusted us with something precious. When something terrible happens anyway, it is hard not to ask whether we failed them. Could we have known? Intervened? Those questions are necessary. Institutions owe it to everyone involved to examine what happened and change what should change. Sometimes, most times, there is nothing anyone could have done.

There is a difference between accepting responsibility for the work entrusted to us and believing we control every outcome. We can build strong systems. We cannot build ones that outrun tragedy.

Our responsibility has never been to guarantee that students would never face danger or loss. No institution can promise that honestly. Our responsibility is to build communities worthy of the trust placed in us, and to answer for that trust with competence and humanity when it is tested by things beyond our control.

International education attracts deeply relational people. We do not think of students as enrollment numbers or immigration records. We think of them as the people who enlarge our campuses and our sense of the world, and that is why loss cuts as deep as it does.

After tragedy, life continues. New students arrive. Someone needs a travel signature. Someone else has lost a passport. A family wants to know if their child is eating well.

International education runs on hope. Every arrival is a bet on a future larger than the present. Loss does not cancel that hope. It only tells you how much it was worth.

The students we have lost stay part of our institutional story. We honor them by continuing to take the students who are here just as seriously.