Mark Twain once said that he never let school interfere with his learning. Twain didn’t like sitting in a classroom while the best learning was outside in the real world. Last weekend Stephen Cottrell, a part-time teacher of world geography at Mississippi State University, loaded 13 of his students on a bus and took off to Bayou Labatre, Ala., which is on the coast of the state, to be submerged in Southeast Asian culture.
“I thought it was a mind-altering experience,” said Camille Meyer-Arendt, an international business student who went on the trip. “We were in south Alabama, but it felt like we were in Cambodia.”
Cottrell believes it is good for students to be a part of things they are not familiar with.
“The trip was an opportunity to get out of the classroom and learn about an entirely different culture,” he said. “Students become the minority for the first time in their lives, religiously, linguistically and racially.”
Bayou Labatre is heavily populated with Southeast Asians-Cambodians, Laotians and Vietnamese. The population of the coast community is close to 3,000 with one-half of those being Southeast Asian refugees.
During the reign of the Khmer Rouge Regime from 1975 to 1978 refugees needed places to go, and the United States accepted them in varying degrees in different parts of the nation. From 1975 to 1985 130,000 refugees entered the United States from Cambodia.
About 1,000 of those refugees went to Mobile, Ala., and stayed there until 1986. After poor success with finding work over a period of five years the refugees discovered a more fertile area to live in. That area was Bayou Labatrie, which had job opportunities in picking crabs and heading shrimp.
“Bayou Labatre is a blue-collar, commercial-fishing, shrimpboat- building, seafood-processing town,” Cottrell said
Cottrell and the students spent the weekend in Bayou Labatre and experienced the local color of the area by putting themselves in situations they had never been in before, except for Cottrell.
“It’s intimidating at first but it opened all kinds of new doors for me,” MSU senior Leah Cooper said. “Their culture is so rich and expressive; when you sit there you don’t understand a word they’re saying, but you can feel all their heritage and beliefs coming out.”
The students went to the mouth of the bayou, the end of the bayou, Buddhist Temples and everyday spots such as Vietnamese grocery stores.
“At the Vietnamese Buddhist Temple I told them (students) that they could sit there and observe and listen to the exotic language the people were speaking,” Cottrell said. “If they wanted to they could close their minds and pray or meditate.”
“The temples were colorful; there were incense, candles and statues. All the walls were filled with paintings of Buddha,” junior Katherine Hutson said.
Cottrell compared the type of learning that happened on this trip to the work of cultural anthropologists.
“The goal is not to be an observer, but a participant observer,” he said.
This is the fourth year that Cottrell has been on this trip and he said he usually goes twice a year. When he takes his spring trip he makes it a point to be there during the Buddhist New Year because he said it gives the students “more bang for their buck” when it comes to understanding Southeast Asian culture.
The scene on the streets in Bayou Labatre during the new year celebration include monks blessing, chants, music, feasts, dancing and children playing, according to Cottrell.
“They taught us how to do their native dances,” Hutson said. “They had a big potluck dinner, and we got to eat their food. I didn’t like it too much, but it’s interesting to try new things.”
Students that go on this trip get to experience a different way of life, but Cottrell is no stranger to Southeast Asian culture.
“I’ve been married to a Cambodian Refugee for 17 years,” Cottrell said. “My father-in-law is a Buddhist monk in Cambodia and my mother-in-law is a Buddhist nun.”
Cottrell developed an interest in Southeast Asia when he spent time there during Vietnam as a Marine and after the war as a member of the Peace Corps.
Cottrell said he plans to continue taking students on excursions to Bayou Labatre. He said students do not have to be majoring in world geography to go but must have a “hunger for knowledge.