American college students hole up in Beirut

Bob Sullivan Reporter • Profile • E-mail

Joanne Nucho thought she would be spending her summer in a safe Western-style city when she headed off to Beirut, Lebanon, to study Arabic as part of her doctoral program at UCLA. The city is hip and urban, with many comforts of home — there's even a McDonald's across the street from her school, American University in Beirut, and several Starbucks stores nearby.

But suddenly she finds herself huddled in a college dormitory with 40 other Americans, trapped in the middle of an undeclared war and fearing for her life.

"I've never been this scared in my life," she told MSNBC.com by phone Friday afternoon (the middle of the night in Beirut). "... Two hours ago I was curled up in a corner crying. The sound of the bombs are shaking me to the bones. My whole body is in trauma. ... As an American you never experience things like this. You see it on TV, but it's nothing like this."

Nucho, 27, is one of several hundred U.S. residents studying abroad this summer at the American University in Beirut, a school accredited in New York state that has about 7,000 students, most of them from Middle Eastern countries.

Nucho is one of about 40 students in the summer Arabic language program, many of whom have been huddled in a university dormitory since fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah guerrillas broke out Wednesday.

Reached via cell phone about 3 p.m. ET, Nucho said that before heading to the lower floors of the dormitory, she spied a battery of warships just off the coast in the Mediterranean Sea.  All night, rockets from the ship soared over the school, she said.

Rockets roar overhead
"The ships are all about a few hundred meters from my balcony," she said. As rockets fly overhead, "The sound is awful."

The group is holed up in a low floor on the dormitory, one that is "not a proper shelter," she said. She has access to clean water and some food she bought at a local store during the day, but not much. There are no school officials nearby, so the students are running the shelter operations by themselves.

"It's literally being run by 19-year-olds," she said. "We don't know what to do."

"I just want to go home," she added.

Prospects of that aren't good right now. Beirut airport, about 10 miles south of the school, is closed, bombed earlier this week by Israeli warplanes.

U.S. State Department officials are discussing the possibility of evacuation with the Defense Department, but for now, the roughly 25,000 U.S. citizens in Lebanon are being told to stay put.

"There aren't any ... reliable ways to get out by air, land or sea," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Friday. U.S. citizens are being told to "assess what is best for their own personal security."

If conditions change and a reliable way out emerges, Americans are urged to leave, McCormack told NBC's Libby Leist.

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