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A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

Living Routes program shuts down

Flickr/Michael Nyika
Flickr/Michael Nyika

Study abroad provider Living Routes has shut down after suspension of its Affiliation Agreement with the University of Massachusetts following an incident that occurred last semester involving a student participating in a Living Routes program at the Monteverde Institute in Monteverde, Costa Rica.

On Dec. 27, UMass suspended the agreement, which had enabled students to receive academic credit while abroad with a Living Routes program. The office, located in Amherst, shut down late last month, according to an article by the Associated Press.

Twenty-eight students have been affected by this suspension, according to an article published by Inside Higher Ed. Living Routes is responsible for finding these students alternative programs to participate in.

According to their website, Living Routes was a study abroad provider focused on giving students an environmental experience where they could work with the land they lived on. Students lived around the world in what the non-profit organization called “eco-villages.”

Their website also said that the organization is expecting to legally dissolve by March 31st.In an open letter, the student involved in the incident talked about being raped while abroad.

According to her letter, the director of the Monteverde Institute, Deborah Hamilton, forced the student to sign legal waivers and report the assault, telling the victim that it was her “legal obligation” to do so.

In Costa Rica, only the victim of a crime has the right to report that crime, but he or she is under no legal obligation to do so, according to a document released by the Pan American Health Organization.

According to a letter sent by Jack Ahern, Vice Provost for International Programs at UMass, Living Routes became aware of the “serious, and potentially life threatening, health/safety issue” on Dec. 2, but failed to notify the University.

Ahern states that the University remained unaware of the incident until Dec. 18, when a resident of Monteverde emailed UMass faculty about his concern regarding “the handling and treatment of the victim.”

Living Routes continued to withhold information from the University until Ahern received an email on Dec. 22, which confirmed the incident and released the name of the victim.

Ahern wrote, “(UMass Amherst) has grave concerns regarding Living Routes’ ability to fulfill its contractual obligations to be responsible for all health, risk and safety issues that may arise during a program’s term, to communicate with (UMass Amherst), and to provide equal access to the Program’s resources.”

UMass has requested the return of all payments made for the spring 2014 semester, which is estimated to be over $200,000.
Both Amherst College and Mount Holyoke College, neither of which were ever affiliated with Living Routes, continue to send students to the Monteverde Institute, according to school officials.

This is not the first time Living Routes has been involved in a health and safety issue with the University. According to an article published by MassLive, UMass student Katherine Sherman died in 2008 while participating in a Living Routes program in India.

Officials in India ruled her death a suicide; however, an independent autopsy performed in the U.S. ruled the results inconclusive.

Marie MacCune can be reached at [email protected].

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  • H

    HilaryJun 23, 2014 at 10:27 pm

    James, I cannot imagine what you and your family have gone through. I don’t represent anyone – just someone reading this off the internet.
    I did live in India for 4 years on my own though and I can tell you the very strangest things happen there. It can be a very dark place, although I was mysteriously unscathed. There is no rhyme or reason of why things happen there – it is a mad house which I loved at the time but now can’t imagine how I made it out alive and half sane. Everyone there thinks they’re in a Bollywood movie and life sometimes felt like that – bloody awful dancing and all.

    Sincere condolences on your sister’s death. It doesn’t sound like suicide and I know that if it were my sister, the non resolution of this would haunt and anger me forever.

    Thoughts are with you. This has made me very sad.

    Reply
  • J

    JamesFeb 17, 2014 at 5:05 pm

    Doctor, as her brother, let me say that Katie’s death was definitely not just as reported. We did not want to speak to the media the day after the incident, however, Living Routes was all too happy to speak to absolutely everyone to make sure the story was she killed herself.

    The amount of circumstantial evidence showing her death was suspicious is incredible. There was no evidence of depression and sadness(her journals detailed a whole lot, but nothing related to feeling down), in fact she was very happy helping the women and children at a battered women’s shelter in India.

    There was no way for her to reach the roof of the hut she was in to tie the noose, it was too high up even standing on something, and she was fairly short. It was also a professional-level yachtsman’s knot, and she was notoriously bad at knots.

    We have reason to believe she was poisoned. One of the counselors she was grouped with is a practitioner of using powdered metals in medicines to “cure” people of various ailments without their consent, I forget the name for this backwards belief but I could very easily see him giving her some copper-based compound since she had said she was feeling sick earlier that day, and then having something go very wrong since she was allergic to copper, panic, and set it up like a suicide(he also happens to be a yachter or boatsman or something like that, which would make the yachtsman’s knot make sense). However, we could not check this ourselves as the Indian government refused to give us her corpse back until they had performed an autopsy on it. They removed all possible organs that could contain chemical evidence of poisoning, her stomach, liver, and other organs were removed without comment. Her body was improperly embalmed so that we were unable to have a complete autopsy performed when her body was returned to us. The facilities they said the autopsy would be performed in were supposed to be “some of the best India has to offer”, so for them to botch the entire thing makes it extremely suspicious.

    But the most damning thing is the crime scene photos. The Keystone Kops of India showed up with a windup camera that didn’t work to take photos of the scene, so they improvised and used my sister’s own photographer’s camera(she was there to earn credits so she could apply as a National Geographic photographer) to take the photos of her own corpse, which I’m sure she would have found morbidly and ironically hilarious. They did not tell us they took those photos and erased them from the SD card, but my dad managed to recover them when we got her possessions back. We provided them to a coroner who said, unequivocally, that she was not conscious at the time of the hanging, because when you hang yourself, your body rejects your mind and struggles against the noose, clawing at the throat, etc, but her body was in a relaxed state with her arms at her sides and her body leaning backwards, legs out and resting on the floor.

    Keep in mind another student in India also “committed suicide” by stabbing himself repeatedly fully through the neck with a butcher knife, having to shove it all the way through and then pull it out and repeat the process. If that sounds like suicide to you, well, I dunno what to say. I firmly believe Living Routes and the Indian government covered it up, as my sister was EXTREMELY outspoken against suicide, since we witnessed firsthand a family friend of ours who had killed himself and what it did to his family.

    Of course, by the time all this stuff had come to light, the media didn’t give even half a shit about talking to us anymore.

    Reply
  • D

    Dr. Ed CuttingFeb 14, 2014 at 11:14 am

    I have LONG had problems with the nonchalant manner in which UMass abandons students to internships and the like — I’ve seen the university send kids down to DC (Washington, DC) and literally abandon them — on several occasions, I, as an adviser to a RSO, wound up dealing with problems students were having because no one else at UMass seemed to care.

    (By contrast, the University of California has a full fledged student affairs office in DC for it’s students — I know because I almost applied for a job there. Other institutions do as well.)
    .
    UMass collects a full semester’s worth of tuition & fees — and what exactly does the university provide to the student in return? If Enku Gelaye and others wish to bring back En Loco Parentis (and they have) then that means that the university has a parental obligation to look out for its students. It has an obligation to provide advice and guidance to students who are in distant (and quite unfamiliar) venues — the students’ parents are expecting that UMass will do this.
    .
    When the student was raped, there should have been someone at UMass she could have called — if not in the middle of the night, at least the next day — and that person should have “fixed” things — arranged for a local (Costa Rican) lawyer and/or women’s advocate to advise her, ensured that she received proper medical care if she wished it (and ensured that she had the choice on that) — and gotten her back to Amherst, at UM expense if need be. And between all the professors and graduate students, there was no one on campus who knew enough about Costa Rica to get a student the resources she needed?

    What if instead it had become a situation like that of Amanda Knox (regardless of what the actual facts in that mess are). What if, as sometimes happens to undergraduate women, she had unintentionally become pregnant? Not raped but pregnant as the result of her consensual relationship with a boyfriend she met down there — and who would be helping her sort through the emotional stuff which could range between an abortion and marrying the guy — in a foreign country with which she may not be all that familiar. Who would have gotten her the answers she needed — who would have been there for her?

    Suicides can be prevented — I’ve done it on the far side of Midnight, and more than once — would the student in India be alive today if there had been someone she could have called at UMass? I emphasize that I’m not saying there wasn’t, but the question ought to be asked. PARENTS ought to ask the question before permitting their kids to go on these adventures…

    I was just a graduate student, but I knew people through professional organizations and such — *I* could (did) call/email folk I knew in DC and find resources for kids — UMass couldn’t/can’t?. On one occasion, I personally called the George Washington University Police Department and obtained some information for a student, including the direct number of the GWUPD’s switchboard, which was something that one UMass student very much needed at the time. On another occasion, I had reason to speak with the woman in charge of issuing lawyer licenses in the State of Connecticut — the woman *in charge* of this — and I got a specific answer to a specific question for a different student. If I could do this, why couldn’t the university?
    .
    What, exactly, are students getting for all the money they pay (TO UMASS) for these semester-wherever’s????

    Reply