International students remind University to “Remember Me Too”
Max Mayleben
Media Editor
While many students at Minnesota State University, Mankato were able to return home and spend this uncertain time of unemployment and online schooling with family, international students are in a different, and more difficult situation.
There are currently 1,266 international students that attend MNSU, making up roughly 9% of the student population. Many of these students have lost their jobs and are lacking financial support from families due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
These students are finding difficulty paying for food, rent, and University fees among other bills. On top of that, many are not able to return home due to travel bans, and those who can, risk not being able to come back to continue their education.
Members of the Remember Me Too movement aim to support those international students that may be forgotten in this time of dire job insecurity and uncertainty.
Advocates for the Remember Me Too movement have been speaking with politicians in order to raise awareness for these international students. The group discussed various topics federal government support, job creation, and public transportation with 2020 U.S. Presidential Candidate Joe Biden’s team.
Dolly Baruah, advocate for the Rememeber Me Too Movement, said, “It is important for the decision makers to give time to listen to the student needs first rather than making assumptions on what they need”.
The Remember Me Too Movement also points international students in the right direction for assistance as well. Resources available for these students include the Campus Cupboard to get free groceries and hygienic items, on-campus health services, free attorney service on campus and more.
The Remember Me Too Movenemt encourages those who are able to help by donating food items to the Campus Cupboard for those in need. The Campus Cupboard is located at Crossroads Campus near the Performing Arts building.
The Remember Me Too Movement also has a petition to lobby the university to help those students in need. That petition and more information about the Remember Me Too Movement is on their social media.
I am a US Navy Gulf war veteran living in Cambodia but stuck in Vietnam due to Covid border closures. I have have travelled 77 countries, shot over a half million quality photos around the world, ten thousand photos typically on this particular trip visiting the famous ancient Malayo Hindu Cham towers of what has become an impoverished matriarchal Muslim culture in Vietnam and Cambodia.
The thought of going back to school–a dorm room sans meal plan at MSU would cost around six hundred dollars a month. I pay 130 dollars a month for an air con apartment in Seam Reap, Cambodia and can learn all the Chemistry and Astronomy I want from Youtube lectures.
I recently spent one week at Cho Ray Hospital in Saigon where I lost a toe in a motorcycle accident. My Australian trsined surgeon and his students were excellent. The cost for everything: $500.00.
Good ridden to my toe. I am now an honorary Cambodian amputee.
Hello, I am still in Vietnam due to Covid closures and loving this most wonderful of Southeast Asian countries. I have been here since March first and have explored Cham towers galore up and down the east coast of Vietnam, most of them not mentioned in guide books, especially the vaunted Lonely Planet, and which I found only by Googling locations on the Cham map in Danang’s Cham Museum, a museum filled with thousand year old Hindu sculptures, many of them adorably cartoonish in nature. (Danang now is closed due to a Covid surge caused by visiting Chinese tourists only a month ago.)
The matriarchal Cham minority entered Vietnam maybe eighteen hundred years ago from Borneo, speaking a Malayo Polynesian language related to Hawaiian but is most closely related to the language of the matriarchal Muslim Ache people of western Sumatra who were blasted by a tsunami a decade ago. More than a thousand years ago, the Chams battled the ancient Khmers of the famed Cambodia Angkor Wat culture of Siem Reap where my home is, but I can’t get back there now due to border closures.
The huge twelve hundred year old Cambodian Angkor temple complexes are the most popular tourist attraction on the planet during normal non Covid times. There are beautiful carvings of these Cambodian Khmer/Cham battles on Angkor Wat’s Bayom Temple as well as on outlying temples in far flung jungle areas that I have nearly died bicycling to in northwestern Cambodia.
The Cham minority converted to Islam in eleven hundred AD from Omani merchants, but now live in poverty along the canals in Siem Reap, Phnom Penh as well as here in Saigon and up in Natrang along the east coast of Vietnam where their ancient tower temples still stand but are largely ignored by tourists and the Vietnamese themselves.
Here in Vietnam there is a huge Cambodian Khmer minority that have built modern Khmer cities with beautiful modern Khmer temples in the southern Mekong Delta, a gorgeous tropical area of fruit trees and rice paddies along the four huge branches of the Mekong River in the delta interlaced by an endless network of canals. The Khmers have built large cities not far from where the southern delta leaps into the sea.
A thousand years ago the Mekong Delta was part of Cambodia’s ancient Angkor Civilization which is why the Khmer Rouge insanely and sentimentally tried to take it back from the Vietnamese in the late seventies after the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1979 put an end to the Khmer Rouge and the USA’s support of them.
The Vietnamese were actually late arrivals in Vietnam. They were speakers of a Mon/Khmer language that came down from the north of Vietnam around five or six hundred years ago. They had constant wars with the Chams, but eventually took over all of Vietnam in the eighteenth century, so you can see how the Vietnamese are not unlike the Europeans who took America from the natives. And you can see that the the Vietnamese and Cambodian Khmers come from the same Mon/Khmer Language family which has its Hindu roots still in Orissa State, India south of Calcutta as well as in Myanmar where the Burmese enslaved the Mon minority people making them build Bagan, a huge semi desert city of a thousand sandstone pagodas that turn bright red at sunset among the cacti on the great vast plain along the Irrawaddi River of central Burma.
You can find the Mon minority in my favorite city of Bangkok living along the Mon Canal there not far from the Cham Muslim people also living along the other canals there. And, in Cambodia, there is an impoverished Vietnamese minority that live in floating villages on the Tonle Sap lake. They are a predominantly Roman Catholic minority with churches and houses floating on the lake. I hope, now, you can appreciate why I love this part of the world so much
If you are at all interested in Cham towers and modern Khmer temples as well as some gorgeous photos of the amusing lives of people living in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, please check out my Facebook photos, which are open to everyone. My Cambodian temple albums are no longer currently available due to Facebook censorship of some of my photography (I have shut them down), but you can Google Angkor Wat and learn about them that way.