Fund helps Indochinese students

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

During a business trip to Cambodia last year, Mark Ashwill, director of the World Languages Institute, was struck by how little public or private money is available in the region for promising students who want to attend college or graduate school overseas.

Ashwill, whose interest in Indochina has resulted in several language-culture exchange programs involving Vietnamese and American universities, businesses and cultural groups, decided to do something about it.

This week, he announced the establishment of a private association to provide financial and other forms of support to qualified students from Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos who want to pursue relevant, useful and quality education and training in the United States.

Initial funding for the U.S.-Indochina Educational Foundation, Inc., or USIEF, was provided by a $10,000 grant from the Paul J. Koessler Foundation. Additional funds will be solicited from individuals, corporations and other private foundations that make grants to public charities.

"Opportunities in the global marketplace are limited for developing nations without a substantial business or professional class with international experience or education," Ashwill says.

"These countries need their own entrepreneurs, humanities scholars, educators, scientists, physicians and business managers to bring their countries to economic maturity without compromising national identity and cultural values.

"Unfortunately," he adds, "they don't have the educational infrastructure they need to offer higher education and professional training to large numbers of their people.

"Because of these obstacles, it's difficult for nations like Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to prepare their young people for the rapidly evolving 'new world.'" As a result, he says these nations remain economic backwaters, subject to foreign exploitation of their people and resources.

Ashwill says one of the important steps toward development is to send selected students abroad for advanced study, particularly in business management, economics, technology, education, medicine and the sciences.

The opportunity, however, is usually available only to children of upper-class families or to those few students whose governments are able to underwrite their foreign studies.

Ashwill says that Indochina students already receive some scholarship money from the Australian and Japanese governments and from a few Fulbright grants distributed in the region. But the funding available doesn't come close to satisfying the need, he says.

Each country has discrete issues to resolve in this regard. Vietnam has a number of established colleges and universities, Ashwill says, but little money available to support further education overseas.

Laos has a different problem. An agrarian nation, it has only a rudimentary system of higher education and only one university, which focuses on agricultural research with the assistance of a few Canadian and American colleges.

Ashwill says the first concern of the USIEF will be for Cambodia, which faces a situation more dire than Vietnam or Laos.

"An entire generation of the intelligencia, as well as the business and professional classes, were wiped out in the Khmer Rouge genocide of 1975-79," Ashwill reminds us, "This disaster left the Cambodian economy and educational system in ruins with no one capable of rebuilding either."

In fact, the first Indochinese student to receive financial assistance from the new foundation is Sokna Hang of Cambodia. A scholarship student in UB's English Language Institute, Hang is preparing for graduate study in management or law in an American university.

Further information about the USIEF is available at http://www.usief.org