in the land of the lamas

Though it’s hard to believe how fast the time has gone, I’ve already said a few of my goodbyes and am now beginning the next chapter of my trip. Thursday was my last day to volunteer with Cross-Cultural Solutions, so I will no longer be leading the women’s group during the week. I will, however, see the women from Khaniyara again because one of them has invited me to live with her family for my last week in India. Until then, I am staying in upper Dharamsala to finish interviews for my Departmental Honors project.

For my time in upper Dharamsala, I initially planned to rent a room at the guest house of the Geden Choeling Nunnery, but an opportunity arose for me to do a home stay with a Tibetan woman, which will be an invaluable asset to my research. The woman is a single mother, and her two children and niece attend a residential branch of the Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharamsala. Her flat consists of one small room and a tiny kitchen, but it’s more than adequate for the two of us. She moved here from Tibet in 1997 and her family is nomadic, so she never received a formal education. Thus, finding profitable work in Dharamsala is difficult, and she is currently unemployed. She goes to the Dalai Lama’s temple every morning to do prostrations and circumambulate the temple complex, and I’m looking forward to sharing part of her daily routine.

Last weekend, I went to the Tibetan craft home for children with disabilities one last time to play soccer with the students and tell everyone goodbye. Since the school is in a town just outside of lower Dharamsala and I’m now living even further away, I decided it would be too difficult to keep going three afternoons a week. The staff and students gave me a warm send off with tea and cookies, and the director of the school put a white cloth around my neck, which is the traditional custom for giving a blessing. The director also set aside a generous amount of time to talk with me about my research, and her comments were insightful. She has worked with the Tibetan Women’s Association and the Tibetan Children’s Villages in the past and currently serves as an elected member of the Tibetan Parliament in Exile.

As for the conclusion to my work with the women’s group, we spent the last couple weeks testing our luck at writing a grant proposal. When I first began volunteering with the group, the women indicated an interest in starting an income-generating project, and we brainstormed ideas for start-up funds and long-term sustainability. We encountered some obstacles along the way, and it was a great exercise in patience-building because everything here moves twice as slowly as it seems like it should. No one is in any particular hurry. It turned out for the best, though, because the women have decided they want to focus on non-profit work instead. Since their main goal is to promote women’s empowerment, they plan to concentrate their energy on initiating new women’s groups in other villages instead of generating a non-essential, supplementary income for themselves. Their vision is to expand their work from its current sphere of seven villages into a total of twenty area villages to provide young women with technical training, educate them about their legal rights, and build their confidence in the face of prevailing gender inequalities. In response to national concerns such as the declining gender ratio and trends of female infanticide and neglect, the women want to reverse the perception that girls are a liability instead of an asset to the family. Since it’s difficult to change ingrained ideologies, they hope to first change the practical circumstances of young women by equipping them with the skills they need to succeed.

Though their ideas are admirable and well-developed, they cannot be implemented without funding for transportation, workshops, and educational materials. I did some research on a few grant-providing institutions the women suggested, told them what information I thought we would need to provide in an application, and initiated discussions about their objectives for the project. Beyond that, the women compiled all the information and wrote everything in Hindi. They talked with me during our class time and explained what the Hindi version said so I could take notes in English and then re-phrase and format the proposal. I wanted the ideas to come directly from them so they feel like it’s their project, not mine. Though they needed help polishing the English version, they didn’t require any assistance in generating the core ideas they wanted the proposal to express. Though I won’t be with them to see the results of the proposal, I hope they will enjoy a return from their efforts.

As I prepare to leave for home in a couple weeks, I know I could never be here long enough to experience everything India has to offer. Even so, I’m thankful for the time I’ve had and have no regrets about my decision to spend a semester abroad. I find that I usually have a greater appreciation for a trip when I get home and consider it in retrospect, but here, I am daily struck by how extraordinary and irreplaceable every experience is. I try to appreciate even the most awkward situations as just a few more cultural experiences that I wouldn’t really want to miss. I’ve found that my days here hardly ever go as planned, but in the end, the spontaneity is always more rewarding than the schedule.