As an international student from India, I’ve found that I am just as much Delhi’s as I am Dartmouth’s. While I am often not fully present in either place, I am never truly absent either. Whenever I return to Delhi, I hyper-fixate on everything that is different — how my city has changed, how I have. For me, it’s usually only small details — my childhood park getting renovated, the family jokes I need to be looped into, having to look up the route to my best friend’s house — yet it still feels all-consuming.
While these feelings of displacement are meaningful to me, they have an entirely different magnitude for international students who must witness their countries face violent conflict and civil unrest. I spoke with some of these students to better understand how the tumult in their home countries is impacting their time at Dartmouth.
One such student is Pan Thu ’26, an international student from Myanmar. In 2021, one year before Thu arrived at Dartmouth, the Burmese military launched a coup and implemented a military dictatorship. Since then, the country has seen mass protests, violent crackdowns by the military and civil war.
“A lot changed overnight,” Thu said. “They could arrest people for protesting. They can arrest people who are posting … on social media. A lot of people were shot and killed [in] the streets, even in major cities. … It was basically a massacre.”
The weight of distance is also heavy for Muhammad Faisal Azizi ’24, an international student and asylum seeker from Afghanistan. After the Taliban regained control of the country in 2021 — while Azizi was studying at the American University of Afghanistan — Azizi had to “seek hideouts” to save his life before eventually coming to Dartmouth in 2022. Most of Azizi’s family and friends, however, are still in Afghanistan, and he said he “constantly think[s]” about their safety.
“I’ve lost friends,” Azizi said. “A lot of Afghans died. We accepted … we can die anywhere, anytime, if you’re in the country.”
Azizi added that he has not been able to go back home for the past three years due to “fear of persecution … harassment, physical assault” and the threat of being killed.
“If you go back, you might end up in a grave somewhere,” Azizi said.
Azizi is not the only student who is unable to go back home due to conflict. Danylo Borodchuk ’26, an international student from Kyiv, Ukraine, said he cannot return to his home country due to martial law — which forbids men aged 18 to 60, with some exceptions, from leaving Ukraine during wartime. If he went home, Borodchuk explained, he would be prevented from coming back to the United States.
Though Borodchuk said he is “very grateful” to attend school in the United States and feel “safe,” he said it is “difficult” to be at Dartmouth when his friends are back in Ukraine. Since he has been unable to return home, the “only real insight” he has about the war comes from the news and people back home, which feels “very disconnecting.”
“I do talk to a lot of my friends from back home,” Borodchuk said. “Every once in a while, I ask them how things are going. And I think by this point, fortunately or unfortunately, people have just kind of gotten used to [the war].”
He added that it was “better” that he had not been able to see the wreckage of Ukraine in person, because he “doesn’t know” how he would react.
“Looking back at some of the footage of the war, it was surreal … seeing places I knew in states that were completely unrecognizable now,” Borodchuk said. “A lot of the parts of the streets I grew up on now look completely different.”
For these students, watching their home countries go through so much turmoil from afar creates an almost unbearable tension. Thu said she has a “hard time having fun,” adding that a feeling of “guilt” overshadows her time on campus because “other people [her] age are directly contributing” to the resistance effort. After the civil war started, several of her high school classmates from Myanmar chose to join the People’s Defence Force, an armed group fighting to reinstate the previously elected government, instead of going to college.
Thu said she often finds herself wondering why she is in a safe location rather than her family members.
“Why am I here?” Thu asked. “My grandparents don’t deserve to be back at home. They’ve gone through so much in their life. What about my cousins that are little babies? Why me and why not any of them?”
Thu said her feelings of survivor guilt and powerlessness intensified when she came across a video on Instagram of soldiers that had caught two People’s Defence Force members. The video depicted the soldiers pinning the PDF members to a tree, starting a fire from underneath their feet and burning them alive. Upon watching the clip, Thu broke down. She found it difficult to go to class or eat and would “throw up several times” throughout the day, she said.
“When I hear a really bad update about back home, I get ill for several days,” Thu said. “And it’s also so hard to explain to your professor why you’re being that way … [and] missing class.”
It is even harder to deal with these crises alone. Last fall, Azizi experienced some medical difficulties, which were exacerbated by the fact that he was unable to see his family. He said he “wishes” he had a home in the United States where he could have taken a medical leave or “stayed with his family” while he recovered.
“You want to be around your family, your mom, dad, sister, brother,” Azizi said. “You want to talk to them, eat with them, just be around them. Not being sure when you might see them again, not being able to contribute to your country when it needs it most — it’s really hard.”
To help navigate these challenges, students have built new support systems and found comfort in campus communities. Azizi said he appreciated the relationships he has formed in college, adding that he is “trying to focus on what’s in [his] control.” Still, his experience is so different from his peers — making it difficult to go about life on campus.
“I have to think about my family every day, every night,” Azizi said. “Are they okay? … Is anything happening to them? If something is going on in the country, I have to … follow up on that.”
Thu described a similar struggle of “having to start a life” at Dartmouth and “be okay with it,” without feeling “miserable” by constantly thinking about home. She said her parents have helped her accept that she needed to keep moving forward by attending classes, socializing and trying to find joy on campus.
“[My parents] told me it’s not my time to fight,” Thu said. “Getting an education is also really important because after all this, the nation needs to rebuild. My fight is in the future.”
Borodochuk agreed, adding that he wants to be able to “make the most” of his time at Dartmouth despite the Russia-Ukraine war.
“I’m really thankful to be here, at the very least,” Borodochuk said. “I still keep in touch with a lot of people there to try and help out however I can.”
