Globetrotting Spider explores human rights
Daniel Polonia soaked it all in: He 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. The junior from Long Island bonded with host families over delicious home-cooked meals, including a spiced ramen-noodle-and-egg dish in Nepal, a yogurt-based rice-and-lamb dish in Jordan, and savory empanadas in Chile.
But Polonia’s fall-semester study-abroad experience went much deeper than visiting popular tourist attractions and enjoying local cuisine and culture. Through the International Honors Program offered by the School for International Training (SIT), Polonia and 16 other college students, including fellow Spider Lila Taylor, ’26, undertook a comparative study of human rights in Nepal, Jordan, and Chile.
“I’d been learning about human rights in my University of Richmond classes,” said the leadership studies and rhetoric and communication studies major and women, gender, and sexuality studies minor. “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’s SIT program ran from Aug. 28 – Dec. 9, beginning with a 10-day launch in New York City. There, students visited social justice nonprofits and discussed the city’s affordable housing crisis with a New York State assemblyman. They also started the classes they would take throughout the semester — two on human rights, one on field work and research methods, and one on civil societies and NGOs.
On Sept. 6, the SIT students arrived in Nepal for the first of their three one-month country stays. “The Nepalese greeted us by putting katas, traditional ceremonial scarves, around our necks,” Polonia said. “I thought, Wow, I’m with a lot of really friendly people!”
In Terai, a region in southern Nepal, the SIT students met survivors of domestic violence and female leaders of a nonprofit that promotes women’s rights and gender equality. They also encountered local men helping women form a co-op and develop their economic skills.
On Oct. 7, Polonia arrived in Jordan, where he and his fellow travelers noticed the restrictions on women, including what they could wear in public. But, he said, “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. My perspective on the conflict shifted after being in Jordan — I now believe there can be a collaborative solution. People on both sides deserve to be heard.”
The final study-abroad destination, Chile, was of special significance to Polonia, a first-generation college student whose family heritage is one-quarter Chilean, one-quarter Colombian, and half Dominican. He visited a number of memory sites that recalled the horrific human rights abuses of General Augusto Pinochet’s 1973-1990 dictatorship. 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, tortured, sexually assaulted, and often murdered by Pinochet’s henchmen.
Polonia collaborated with two other students on a final project, a 20-page cross-cultural study based in part 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.
Taking advantage of the study-abroad opportunities at Richmond has been a highlight of his college experience, Polonia said.
“Meeting people doing the work to fix things changes your perspective. Human rights work will always be difficult, but no one can take away the power you have to work for change.”