Daniel Polonia, a UR junior leadership studies and rhetoric and communication studies major, traveled to Nepal, Jordan, and Chile this past fall semester as part of the Vermont-based School for International Training’s International Honors Program. This program helps prepare scholars to address global issues through experiential education and intercultural exchange.

While Polonia hiked in the snow-capped mountains of Nepal, rode a camel through the rust-colored sands of Jordan’s Wadi Rum Desert, and gazed skyward at the skyscrapers towering over Santiago, Chile, his fall-semester study-abroad experience went much deeper than visiting popular tourist attractions and enjoying delicious home-cooked meals, including a yogurt-based rice-and-lamb dish in Jordan and savory empanadas in Chile.

Polonia participated in a comparative study of human rights with 16 other college students, spending a month in each location.

“I’d been learning about human rights in my University of Richmond classes. But many of the problems we discussed felt distant. By going to places where human rights are in the forefront, I saw leadership being built from the bottom up to address these issues,” Polonia said.

Polonia’s semester started with a 10-day program launch in New York City. During this time, students visited social justice nonprofits and discussed the city’s affordable housing crisis with a New York State assemblyman. They also began their classes — two on human rights, one on field work and research methods, and one on civil societies and NGOs.

By early September, the SIT students arrived in Nepal for the first of their three country stays.

“The Nepalese greeted us by putting katas, traditional ceremonial scarves, around our necks,” Polonia said.

In the Terai region of southern Nepal, the students met survivors of domestic violence and female leaders of a nonprofit that promotes women’s rights and gender equality. A women, gender, and sexuality studies minor, Polonia also encountered local men helping women form a co-op and develop their economic skills.

In October, Polonia arrived in Jordan, where he and his fellow travelers noticed the restrictions on women, including what they could wear in public. “The Israeli-Palestinian war was the elephant in the room. We met Palestinian refugees and a guest lecturer who had worked on an earlier Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty,” he said.

The final study-abroad destination, Chile, was of special significance to Polonia, a first-generation college student whose family heritage is Chilean, Colombian, and Dominican.

There, he visited several sites that evoked the human rights abuses of General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship from 1973 to 1990. In particular, the Presidential Scholar said he was moved by his visit to Casa Memoria José Domingo Cañas, the site of a former Santiago house where many innocent victims were imprisoned.

Polonia collaborated with two other students on a final project, a 20-page cross-cultural study partially based on interviews they conducted in the countries they visited. “The paper explored the extent to which patriarchy in the home impacts female access to activism and what rhetoric keeps women subordinated,” he said.

Polonia said that taking advantage of the study-abroad opportunities at Richmond has been a highlight of his college experience.

“Meeting people doing the work to fix things changes your perspective,” he said. “Human rights work will always be difficult, but no one can take away the power you have to work for change.”