A partnership between the University of Maryland and a Viet Nam community is being strengthened this semester. Dr. Lois Vietri of Government and Politics and College Park Scholars is beginning fundraising for a Cultural House in Tao Tran village, in the Tuyen Quang province of northern Viet Nam. The house will be a center for ethnic minorities, and will be affiliated with a school for minority children that is adjacent to the house site.

    Dr. Vietri is hoping to lead a group of Maryland undergraduate students to Viet Nam during Winter Term 1999. These students will participate in a service learning project, which will include construction of the Cultural House and assessment of long-term training needs for the school, which educates nearly 600 students representing 22 minority groups. The service learning group will be co-led by Kerry Ann O'Meara of College Park Scholars and Tran Dinh Song, teacher, guide, and translator.

     Dr. Vietri has been working on different projects in Viet Nam for since 1991, and is the founder and director of the Maryland Viet Nam Partnership. She also teaches an undergraduate seminar on the public policy of the Viet Nam War.

     If sufficient money is raised for the Cultural House and service learning projects, the program is expected to continue in Summer Session I and for years to come.

ABOUT DR. LOIS VIETRI

     Lois T. Vietri of the Department of Government faculty serves as the Director of the College Park Scholars International Studies Program. As the Director of the Maryland Viet Nam Partnershop, Dr. Vietri has collaborated with scholars, public administration, and business people in the United States and Viet Nam to facilitate training in business and publich administration, research on the normalization process, faculty-student exchanges, and leadershop development for women in the Indochina subregion. She sponsors study aborad programs in Viet Nam and will be launching a service project in a minority village in north Viet Nam in 2000. She has developed public administration and public policy curricula for the Law School at Odessa University, Republic of the Ukraine. She has served as a consultant to suuch federal agencies as the Departments of State, Defence, Education, and Transportation and trained local administrators in the State of Maryland. She has been on the faculties of the Leadership Development Program of the Federal Judiciary System, U.S. Federal Court System and the China International Graduate Program, Southern California University. In addition to several publications on Viet Nam (Viet Nam: An American Perspective and Legacies from the Viet Nam War) and in technology management (managing in the Public Sector; Systems, Complexity and Change and the Business-Government Relationship), she has been the recipient of several campus awards for excellence in teaching and mentorship (College Park Association of Parents Outstanding FAculty Award; College of Behavioral and Social Sciences TEaching and TEaching Mentorship Award). Governor Glendening named Dr. Vietri and two of her undergraduate mentees to his Education Transition Team. She is also a founding member of "The Learning Exchange Project", a long term initiative in teaching innovation at the University of Maryland. Dr. Vietri received a baccalaureate degree in liberal arts from Rosemount College and masters and doctoral degrees from University of Maryland. She also did postgraduate work at the Survey REsearch Institute at the University of Michigan.