I am going to preface this post with this: I have felt safer in Fremantle and Perth than I usually do in Austin, and this includes midnight snack runs to the 24-hour deli and early morning beach visits. The residents of Freo will warn you excessively about safety, but seriously, the police presence is felt and it’s no more dangerous than you’d expect from a pretty small city.

It’s unfortunate, but one of the moments that I’ll never forget about this semester is opening the door to my residence and being met with sight of multiple police officers walking down our stairwell.  Everyone tells you to be safe while studying abroad, but no one tells you what to do once your sense of safety has been completely shaken. My residence hall has about 30 students, and in the last 13 weeks, we have become ridiculously close. Imagine our shock when we realized that the police were in our hall to arrest one of our dorm mates on some incredibly serious and scary charges. Writing this blog, I can tell you that I’m still a little shocked and a lot confused. The student arrested is not study abroad but one of the domestic students. As it is an ongoing investigation, no one really knows the specifics, and a lot is up for speculation, especially in terms of guilt or innocence, until he goes to trial later this year. What we do know for sure is that he was arrested in relation to a murder that took place about 10 minutes from our dorm. It’s pretty important for me to tell you guys that at no point was the student, who many of us consider a friend, a danger to me or any other resident. It’s pretty impossible to wrap my head around the idea that a person I lived with could potentially be involved in an awful crime.

I can also say that I have been completely and totally impressed with how well UNDA has handled this incident. Everyone in the hall was and is shaken by the arrest. The night the incident took place university officials took time from dealing with the police to stop by our common room and reassure us that we were completely safe and explained the best they could at the time why the police would be there all night.

The next day, the mood in the hall was tense and quiet which is really unusual as we’re generally a loud, playful group. That evening we were all called into our common room for a meeting, I’m not sure what I expected but we were given an update on what was happening with our friend who was taken into custody and introduced to various staff members, including counselors who would be available to us for the next few days if need be. I loved that they offered group counseling or decompress sessions that were accompanied by coffee, tea, etc. It was a good way to relieve any pressure or uncomfortableness we may have felt about going into individual counseling. The university reiterated their support for us during this time via e-mail, providing lunch and through their constant presence. The university also took the step of contacting all of our home universities and letting them know what was happening, which saved us the troubling of having to rehash the whole experience. Huge props to the St. Ed’s Office of International Education, which e-mailed to check on us almost immediately after the staff was informed about the incident. It’s always nice to know that we’re being thought of at home, too.

In the two weeks since the incident, we have continued to receive a lot of unexpected support from staff. Although residence life and the study abroad office at UNDA have spearheaded a lot of the effort to make sure we’re all ok, people that we have never come into contact with have popped in with offers of food or hugs or just someone to talk to. We even have a staff member coming in to do an impromptu Chinese cooking lesson with us next week because she wanted to help out. I don’t know about the other students in my residence hall, but I’ve also had one of my lecturers pull me aside and ask if I needed anything because things like this could affect me more than I realized as well as classmates who I have gotten to know this semester who have offered me a place to crash if I need to get out the dorm for a bit.

Nothing could have prepared me for this, not the blogs about going abroad I read or the study abroad orientation I attended. Yet, I am definitely ok. This entire experience has been full of ups and downs, and luckily, even with last week’s experience, they’ve balanced out.