For a group of about 15 Syracuse University students, this year’s Spring Break won’t be spent in the warm sun.

Instead, the students will leave today for Lockerbie, Scotland where they will join magazine professor Melissa Chessher to chronicle the lives of the people who live in the small town.

Alicia Hansen, a graduate photojournalism student, said that although the story is especially important to SU, it will also have a great impact on the rest of the United States and the world because of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

‘People around the world, and especially in America, are thinking about terrorism,’ Hansen said. ‘In Lockerbie, they’re kind of like the wise person who has been through something that we can look up to them for advice and hope that things will be OK in America again.’

In December 1998, Pan American Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, killing 270 people, including 11 people on the ground. Thirty-five of the passengers on the flight were students who were returning to the United States after studying in London through SU’s Division of International Programs Abroad.

Chessher said she was first approached about the idea more than a year ago by photojournalism professor Doc Mason. She said Mason asked a Lockerbie scholar student studying at SU to write a narrative about her hometown to accompany photos of Lockerbie. What she wrote, Chessher said, was a story about the ‘lollipop ladies’ who helped young schoolchildren cross the street. This story was the starting point for the book.

‘It really made Doc think there’s so much more to Lockerbie than just a place where this plane crashed and a lot of people died,’ ‘ Chessher said.

Chessher and Mason worked together to write a Vision Grant request that would allow the two to travel to Lockerbie to document the people’s lives. The grant will pay for the students’ trip this week, and may also allow for a second group to travel to Lockerbie this summer to work on the project.

While in Lockerbie, the students, who are in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, will be required to write two stories that are assigned to them and a third story of their choosing about different aspects of life in Lockerbie. The photojournalism students will be shooting pictures of the stories that are written.

Hansen said she will take photos of a golf course and Gretna Green, a popular Las Vegas-type city near the border of Scotland and England where many people go to get married.

Erica Brath, a magazine, newspaper and online journalism graduate student who is going on the trip, will be shadowing a farm veterinarian and visiting a sugar guild and a Tibetan Monastery outside Lockerbie.

Brath first learned about the monastery after she saw photos of it from Mason. She said she performed an online search, found the monastery’s e-mail address, wrote to the monks and was invited to spend a day with them.

‘It will be really interesting because here’s this peaceful little monastery outside of Lockerbie where this horrible terrorist attack happened,’ Brath said. ‘It’s a really weird juxtaposition.’

Brath and Hansen first learned about the trip in class and through friends. To apply, Brath had to submit an essay. Hansen had to submit a portfolio of her work.

Some of the photojournalism students are using the trip as part of a workshop they need to complete for an independent study, Mason said.

‘Most students are doing it for the incredible experience we expect this to be, and in tribute to the warm relationship that has developed between Lockerbie and Syracuse University,’ Mason said.

None of the students will receive any money for their work on the book. Brath said the proceeds from it will be applied to the Remembrance Fund Scholarship.

‘It’s a really great project,’ Hansen said. ‘I’m glad I can use my talents and skills to contribute to a book that will hopefully change people’s perceptions of a place where a horrible tragedy happened. I hope they see it’s a great place and has so much more to offer.’

Brath said that like Hansen, she too anticipates the book will also help Americans who are feeling vulnerable and hurt after the Sept. 11 attacks.

‘It’s important to write these stories and to profile this town and its people. Especially after September 11, Americans will need to look to a place like Lockerbie that has endured a terrorist attack and survived to tell about it,’ Brath said.

Chessher said another verdict stemming from the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 will be read on March 14 while the students will be in Lockerbie. She said this will give the students’ trip more meaning.

Hansen agreed.

‘It will give us an angle that no other news media will have,’ she said. ‘We’ll have a perspective that’s really unique to Syracuse and SU.’

Chessher said she thinks the book will appeal to an audience wider than Syracuse and Lockerbie and that she hopes the people of Lockerbie will be happy with the end result.

‘How I’ve come to think of Lockerbie is that it’s a child actor who was famous for this one thing and the world wants it to put on the song and dance and do it again. They’re really fed up and just want to be left alone,’ she said. ‘Luckily, they seem to be relieved about a story that doesn’t just talk about the air disaster but actually looks at them as people.’

Published on March 6, 2002 at 12:00 pm