Ball State University students and faculty are preparing to spend the holidays exploring the cultures of Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam as part of the Rinker Center for International Programs' Southeast Asia field trip.
"Christmas and New Year's comes every year and this opportunity won't," senior Cara Reiter said.
The field trip will last about two weeks and cost students $5,600. RCIP's director Jim Coffin said $3,200 of this money is needed for airfare alone, $1,088 is for tuition and the rest will be spent on housing and food. Students will earn six credit hours in an approved department of their choice. The trip will take students on a tour of the region where they will be able to interview its inhabitants in their daily lives.
"We're going to talk to the natives of [the countries we visit] to sensitize ourselves to the issues that face them and to find out how they would like to have those issues resolved to their satisfaction," Coffin said.
The group leaves for Bangkok, Thailand on Dec. 18 and will return to the United States on Jan. 7.
Anthropology professors Evelyn Bowers and Gerry Waite and Coffin's wife, Maggie, will also accompany the students.
Coffin said every class standing and 17 different majors are represented in the 21 students going on the trip. Including the students' minors, anthropology, journalism/telecommunications and French are the most often occurring departments, he said.
"I'm an international business major and I thought going on the trip would be wise personally and professionally," freshman Logan Fischer-Smith said.
"The idea of going into a place I don't know a lot about is exciting and the excitement is building [as the trip approaches]," graduate student Eric Schissler said.
With less than two weeks left before they leave, some of the students said they were anxious. Packing has been difficult because they are only allowed one carry-on bag, freshman Chris Paliga said.
Fischer-Smith said he recently got LASIK surgery because he was worried about how sanitary it would be to bring contacts to Southeast Asia.
Coffin said students should become familiar with Southeast Asia before leaving. He required them to attend lectures by Freshman Connections author Loung Ung and Vietnam War correspondent and prisoner-of-war Steve Bell, TCOM professor at Ball State.
Fischer-Smith said he did not read Ung's book, but gained a better understanding of what happened in Cambodia after he spoke with her about her experience as a survivor of the Cambodian killing fields.
Coffin said he wanted to go to Southeast Asia so he could take students someplace off the beaten path that would make them internationally aware.
"Hardly anyone goes to Cambodia," he said. "[Southeast Asia] is an area that's newsworthy today and has a lifestyle drastically different than we do."
Reiter said as a TCOM major and someone who wants to be involved in the news it is important for her to study abroad so she can stay informed with current issues.
"It's really easy to get caught up in that American mindset that 'we're the best' so it's helpful to learn and experience other cultures," she said.
While abroad, students will stay with the hill tribes of Thailand, interview land mine victims in Cambodia and visit the tunnels of the Viet Cong in Vietnam, Coffin said. They will be required to keep a personal diary and write two papers about their experience.
The group will spend Christmas touring the temples of Angkor Wat, one of the largest religious structures in the world, and probably spend New Year's in Vietnam, he said.
Paliga said the experience is worth the holiday time he will miss with his family.
When the students return to Ball State, they will hold a public forum in the L.A. Pittenger Student Center Yuhas room to share their experiences on the field trip.
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