Yeah, off-site electives (much less out-of-country) have become a vanishing resource in recent times. Most schools pressure most programs to keep their peons in-house doing service work, and many schools have to cut deals with other hospitals to pay for X number of resident positions and in return have to keep X number of residents at that institution year round. While the service work in pathology might be less than in surgery, it's hard for people up the line to let the path kids go but keep the surgery kids in-house, so we kinda get shafted.
It's not that you can't do it, it's just that most programs aren't likely to have an established contact to help you go do an international elective. Many residents are simply too focused on figuring out what fellowship to do, they spend their already limited elective time trying to land a good AP fellowship with a specific rotation. Still, at one program I was at, one of the faculty did some overseas work in helping set up labs, in part for the purpose of diagnosing HIV, and for one or two trips asked for resident volunteers; if someone was on a non-service rotation they were generally allowed to go, but it was only about a couple of weeks or less per trip.
