This is the last event featured during the Southeast Asia Week (March 10-12).
UB Professors Michael Frisch (Departments of American Studies and History) and Jo Freudenheim (Department of Social and Preventive Medicine) and their two daughters, the younger adopted from Vietnam as an infant, have now made five trips to Vietnam on community work projects developed by the Catalyst Foundation. This is an international NGO based in the US and Vietnam, which has been combatting entrenched rural poverty and the child trafficking that preys on it.
Professor Frisch will describe his family’s work on a now-completed project in the Mekong Delta, that began with people living and working in desperate poverty on a garbage dump. The presentation will provide insights into culture, politics, and social issues in a rapidly changing Vietnam. It also will explore the complexity of international adoption, since most of the children among the volunteers were returning to their birth country and culture, encountering the poverty out of which their own adoptions arose.
