Undergraduate students visit Vietnam for international exchange course "Livelihood, Environment and Peace: Studying in Vietnam II" (7-22 August 2015)

The international exchange course "Livelihood, Environment and Peace: Studying in Vietnam" is a joint project among Hue University, located in central Vietnam, Kyoto University's Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies (GSGES) and the Organization for the Promotion of International Relations (OPIR). Over the past nine years, around 120 KU undergraduate students have participated in this program and visited Hue University. This year, five students, accompanied by two faculty members, traveled to the socialist republic in early August for the two-week course.

The 2015 program began with a tour of Ho Chi Minh City, with visits to the Reunification Palace and the War Remnants Museum, enabling the participants to learn more about the history of the Vietnam War. Arriving in Hue City, the students were pleased to be reunited with the Hue University students they had met in Japan in February. The expanded group toured Hue's urban area as well as rural communities to learn firsthand about ethnic minorities and the impacts of ongoing environmental changes on their livelihoods. To round off the central Vietnam program, participants from the two institutions gave a joint presentation on their findings and engaged in a lively discussion with about 20 Hue University students and faculty members. Leaving Hue, the KU students traveled to Hanoi and visited the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology together with their counterparts from the Hanoi University of Science and Technology. Before returning to Japan, they also joined a Japan-Vietnam high school exchange program organized by GSGES as part of Kyoto University's ELCAS ("Experienced-Based Learning Course for Advanced Science"), a university-high school collaborative education initiative.