July 19, 2007
Building for peace: UW students learn and serve in nation where the U.S. once waged war
When Christoph Giebel was a medical rescue technician on a German Red Cross boat in the early 1980s, he treated Vietnamese boat people — men, women and children fleeing the government that took over after the war ended in 1975.
The experience changed his life. “I saw myself helping these people yet didn’t know anything about them,” he recalled. “I wanted to know more about their background — what brought them to the refugee camp in Indonesia.”
Instead of going to medical school as planned, Giebel obtained a doctorate in Southeast Asia studies. Now a University of Washington professor in history and international studies, Giebel and 16 of his UW students are spending six weeks in Vietnam, studying the country and helping rebuild an area particularly devastated by the war in the 1960s and ’70s.
Combination of learning and service work has become more popular in study abroad programs. “Not just academics, but immersion in local culture and engagement with local people,” said Giebel.
“Building for Peace in the Wake of War” is a 12-credit course, organized through the Comparative History of Ideas Program, that runs from June 18 to July 27. In Vietnam, students have spent several weeks in Hue, Ha Noi and Da Nang learning the history and culture of Vietnam. They’re now spending two weeks in Dong Ha, a town in Quang Tri province just south of the former demilitarized zone, learning about post-war rebuilding and the micro-loans available to citizens. They’re also improving a playground and a village square, and planting trees in an area once pockmarked by land mines and unexploded ordnance.
By the end of the war, more than 90 percent of villages in the demilitarized zone between the northern and the southern parts of the country had been destroyed, said Giebel, who specializes in the history of 20th century Vietnam.
He and his students have partnered with PeaceTrees Vietnam, a nonprofit Bainbridge Island resident Jerilyn Brusseau and her late husband, Danaan Parry, founded 12 years ago. Brusseau’s brother, Daniel Cheney, was a U.S. Army helicopter pilot killed in Vietnam in 1969.
Brusseau and Parry founded the International PeaceTrees program. It was originally started to bring young people from warring groups together in neutral, nonthreatening ways.
“It’s about building trust,” said Brusseau. “We wanted to work with Vietnamese people in a way that would honor, dignify and respect all losses on all sides of the war.”
Since 1996, PeaceTrees Vietnam has sponsored clearance of land mines and unexploded ordnance from former battle areas as well as tree planting, micro lending and support of injured people and their families. Most of the UW students’ work will take place near Dong Ha in Peace Trees Friendship Village.
Cost for the course is $3,300 per student plus airfare and most meals. Each UW student has also raised $100 toward building materials for the work in Dong Ha. Program donors may contribute $20 for a tree planted in someone’s honor. A note commemorating the donation will be placed underneath the tree. The donor may write a letter to the Dong Ha community, and a member will respond.
Nhi Tran, a third-year student, is raising part of the money with a bulletin on her MySpace page.
When she was 10, her parents sold their banana jungle and came to the United States so their children could have better opportunities. “They sacrificed for us,” said Tran. Her father had also spent seven years in a concentration camp after the war, and despised the Vietnamese government. “I barely remember what Vietnam was like,” said Tran. “There’s been so much improvement, and I want to witness it for myself.”
Mai-Lan Phan, a sophomore pre-dental student, was born in the U.S. of Vietnamese parents. She wants to meet family members while in Vietnam with Giebel’s group. “I also want to speak a lot more Vietnamese,” she said.
At the end of the visit, students will spend a week writing about their experiences.
There’s no firm data on the number of study abroad programs that include a service component, but anecdotal evidence indicates growth, said Brian Whalen, president and chief executive officer of The Forum on Education Abroad. Located at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., the forum has 250 institutional members in the U.S. and other countries.
“The best colleges try to bridge experiential learning with that in the classroom,” said Whalen. Also, he said, “The millennium generation has grown up with a sense of serving others.” The challenge of dual-purpose courses is that the service component truly fit community need and the academic part must include significant academic work, including writing, said Whalen.
Asked how he plans to teach objectively about the war, Giebel said he will assign readings from multiple perspectives. Too often, he said, the war has been discussed only from American perspectives. Thus, readings will include Vietnamese memoirs reprenting various regional, class and political experiences such as When Heaven and Earth Changed Places by Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese woman who eventually made her way to the U.S.
Globalization makes it important to understand how people in other countries think, said Giebel. It also helps to spend time with native residents. “Having students work alongside local people helps them more deeply understand the lives of those communities.
“The students will have impact and results in that particular locale,” he said, “but the engagement will also have transformative results on them.”
