Students from Chadbourne Residential College shared experiences Wednesday from their summer trip to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus with a crowd of University of Wisconsin students and faculty, as well as Madison members of Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities. They soon discovered political fissures traverse oceans.

Audience members heard about the nine students’ three-week trip through presentations focusing on the Annan Accord. The Annan Accord is a United Nations plan that reunited the formerly divided island in 1989.

Students visited Cyprus to learn how the accord affected everyday citizens in the mostly Turkish North and the southern part of the island, which is largely inhabited by Greeks.

“The purpose of the trip was not for [students] to understand the island academically, but to talk to people in the streets about the situation,” Mary Layoun, academic advisor for Chadbourne Residential College and coordinator of the trip, said. “Students did not read any books about the situation before they went. Being Middle Eastern I understand what it’s like for someone to come into where you are and study you with all these presumptions.”

The Evjue Foundation and Chadbourne Residential College provided the majority of funding for the trip, according to Layoun. Students received credit for observational fieldwork on the island.

The presentations emphasized the economic disparity between the two parts of the island, as well as lingering animosity between the Greek majority and the Turkish minority.

“We viewed each and every one of these perspectives as being on an equal playing field,” UW junior Laura Kalinowski said in front of a picture of an undeveloped area in the North.

UW professor of education Kazannas Andreas, a Greek Cypriot, did not agree with the students’ assessment of the Annan Accord.

“You have your facts wrong,” Andreas said, interrupting the students’ evaluation of Turkish occupation of the north in 1974. “Have you even read the document?”

According to Layoun, a central purpose of the trip was to identify similarities between the poverty level of Turkish Cypriots with that of groups in the United States.

“I worked in Baltimore last summer doing union organizing and I saw places that were worse than the northern part of Cyprus,” Sawan said.

Katarina Strati, a graduate student and a Greek native of Cyprus, said drawing this parallel is what sparked opposition from objecting audience members.

“They are trying to extrapolate the situation to white privilege, and I disagree with that opinion,” Strati said.

Layoun intervened once to quell hostility between several community members and student presenters. She reminded audience members the purpose of the event was not to debate the finer points of the Annan Accord.

“It’s an emotionally charged subject for Greek and Turkish Cypriots, but I think they did an excellent job,” MATC student Odysseus Nadopoulous said.

After the event, both Sawan and Kalinowski said the trip familiarized them with the strong emotions of people from both sides of the island.