By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, two young Sitkans south of the equator found themselves in a difficult position.
For Ashlyn Nutting, an exchange student in Montevideo, Uruguay, the situation transformed in a matter of hours.
“We were kind of expecting it at that point… I was with a couple of my friends sitting at a cafe… when we got the text ‘You need to get on the next flight out,’” she recounted.
“It was actually kind of crazy, everything happened super fast... It just changed in a matter of hours,” Nutting said in an interview.
She got the notice to leave the country and return to the United States on the afternoon of March 14.
Nutting is a sophomore studying Spanish secondary education at Boise State University in Idaho, but was in Uruguay for the semester.
“I knew that I wanted to study abroad ever since I started college… and so my main goal was language immersion.”
Although she had only two full months in South America, Nutting said the experience was positive.
“It was really amazing, I loved it there a lot. The weather was really, really beautiful,” she said. Being below the equator, Uruguay is now in early fall, and was in summer when Nutting arrived.
“The local universe was really incredible and my professors were great,” she said. “I also just really enjoyed having my daily life be in Spanish.”
Her favorite native dish was the empanada, which she described as “fairly similar to a calzone, kind of just dough, and you can put whatever you want inside of it.”
Since it was late summer, many Uruguayans were out of the country on vacation, many in Spain and Italy, which had become hotbeds of the coronavirus pandemic.
“A few days before we were told we needed to leave, the first confirmed cases hit Uruguay, people who had been in Milan,” she said.
Ashlyn Nutting poses in Montevideo, Uruguay. (Photo provided
After receiving the March 14 notice, she acted quickly to return north. “The fear was that international borders were going to start closing.”
By March 16, she was back in Sitka.
“I was so exhausted at that point, I had been flying for two days straight… It was definitely weird getting off the plane and my family was all there, and not being able to give them hugs,” she said.
Nutting expressed surprise at how easy it was to travel in that March 14-16 window of time. The World Health Organization had declared a pandemic on March 11, but travelers could still fly without medical checks or added precautions.
In Sitka she has spent the last two weeks in home quarantine, and has picked up her studies though distance learning, despite difficulties.
Does she hope to return to Uruguay?
“I would love to. As far as the rest of my college career is looking, I’m starting to take my upper division education classes… so I won’t be able to do a full semester abroad again.”
As Nutting was making her hasty departure from Uruguay, anther Sitkan was several hundred miles west, looking for a way out of Argentina.
It was midnight Saturday, March 21, when Sitka High School sophomore Addie Poulson started her odyssey back to Sitka from San Juan, Argentina. It was only a few weeks since she had arrived there as an AFS exchange student.
Poulson described Argentina as “really fun, it’s cool. But the last week I was there it was in complete quarantine.”
She enjoyed her month in the country, and hopes to return.
“I’m already trying to save up so I can go back to Argentina,” she said, although trying for another exchange semester would be difficult, she added.
Addie Poulson talks to her father through a computer connection Friday. Poulson was in self quarantine after traveling five days through airports in Buenos Aires, Santiago, Mexico City, Miami, Atlanta and Seattle. The former exchange student has since tested negative for COVID-19. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)
She said her host family “really wanted me to stay, they were really disappointed because they wanted to show me around Argentina.”
San Juan is in the high desert of western Argentina, closer to Santiago, Chile, than to the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires, on the Atlantic coast.
With only one hour’s notice to leave, Poulson’s trip home started with a road trip of several hundred miles by taxi to Buenos Aires. The country-wide lockdown had started, and her taxi ride was slowed by police roadblocks at internal borders inside Argentina.
“We were stuck there (at a roadblock) for four hours talking to the police,” she said.
In sharp contrast to Nutting’s March 14-16 return to the U.S., Poulson encountered a wide range of security measures at airports.
“It was weird, security for example, there’s nobody there (in line),” she said. “And going through the airports felt like a science fiction movie or novel. If you got in the airport they had to take your temperature, and there were these people in hazmat suits.”
Poulson’s long trip home ended with her arrival on the Alaska Airlines evening flight Thursday, March 26.
Way stations on her six-day journey were airports in Buenos Aires, Santiago, Chile and Mexico City, before she crossed into the United States with stops at Miami, Atlanta and Seattle.
Back in Sitka, she said, “It’s been hard because I haven’t seen any of my friends for a month… and now I have to be quarantined for two weeks.”
But Poulson was reunited with her golden retriever, Belle.
“It was so good to see her!”
