photoshopped by Stephanie
“Hey, I know you.”
I looked over at the teenage boy sitting beside me in the computer lab.
“You do?” There were a ton of little kids running around Sarah’s campus for their winter break.
“Yeah. You stayed with my dad and me. I go to TCV Suja. You have a black camera.”
“Ugyen!” I smiled, remembering how I had stuffed a bag of M&Ms into his NASA backpack before he left to walk back to his home, telling him not to check his backpack until he got there. Apparently, when he discovered the candy, he and his sister plowed through the bag before dinner-time.
I met Ugyen back in June of 2008, when one of the professors and his own teenage son went to visit a science teacher at TCV Suja. They took a train, and I hung back with another professor and the Tibetan translators until the next day, when we took a cab. Upon reaching Suja, we were ushered into their home and given cups of tea and Tibetan bread. Soon after, we visited the campus for a bit before going to visit the Dzongsar Khyentse Chökyi Lödro Institute located in nearby Chauntra.
I had liked his father and Ugyen a lot, and really wanted to spend more time with them, discussing the inner-workings of TCVs and what it was like to be a current TCV student. I thought I had missed my chance, but as it turns out, the Tibetan community is really small, and Ugyen’s father was at Sarah College for a couple of weeks, teaching science.
And there Ugyen was, sitting beside me in the computer lab, looking at the NASA website. He had carried the NASA backpack around the entire time we visited him back in June, and he sheepishly confessed that whenever he’s on the computer, he pulls up the NASA website. Then he started gushing to me about how good his English and Science grades were and how bad his Hindi grade was. “I don’t really care for it,” he said.
Upon finding out that I was the English teacher, he asked if he could join my classes. I told him he was more than welcome to, and his involvement in my classes was nothing short of hilarious– he would often raise his hand, stand up when called on, and ask me if something I said was wrong, and shouldn’t it be this instead? I had to tell him that he was wrong a lot of the times and would see him start blushing and going, “Oooohhh…” as he sat back down. His enthusiasm was amazing to me, because most of my students were shy and would never raise their hand to ask me a question. Of course, they laughed at him every time he raised his hand or corrected one of them, and I learned through rumors that some of the students were actually intimidated by him. Most of them were refugees or, at the very most, first generation Indian-born Tibetans, and couldn’t understand why I had put a second-generation Tibetan in their class who was not only younger than they were, but also so clearly “better” at the English language.
To be honest, I wasn’t about to tell Ugyen that he couldn’t sit in on my class. And I was sort of hoping for a groan from my students. I didn’t want to make them feel bad about their own abilities in English, but I wanted them to see that it was okay to question me, that getting an answer wrong wasn’t the end of the world, and that they could all improve– including Ugyen himself.
In order to force them to speak English to one another, I assigned them a topic from a book and told them that I wanted to only hear the English language in the classroom that day. As soon as I turned around, I heard Tibetan. The assignment, while teaching the class a handful of really useful words, failed– none of the students were talkative enough to make the assignment work, and they were all at such different levels that they simply couldn’t speak to one another in English. Still, every time I turned around or started walking towards Ugyen’s group, he would immediately switch from Tibetan into English, even if his group-mates looked at him like he was speaking an alien language. This kind of fear isn’t unusual among students of TCV, who are reportedly subjected to physical punishment by teachers. As one fellow Sarah teacher told me, “In the ninth grade, they told us we could only speak in English in all of the classes, except for Tibetan. And you know what happened? All the classes got quiet: no one would speak at all!”
Ugyen, and the other TCV kids running around the campus, were a breath of fresh air, for reasons that deserve their own blog entry. In the end, I gave Ugyen some private lessons, which usually ended up in him trying to correct my horrible Tibetan pronunciation and reassuring ME that I was making progress and that the Tibetan language really wasn’t all that hard once you got the basics down.
This desire to help people is a characteristic I have noticed in almost all of the Tibetans I have met. It doesn’t matter if you’re a complete stranger, they will pour you cups of tea until you drown in it and feed you a year’s worth of bread in a single sitting. As a friend once put it, as we were visiting a family friend of hers, “They say they have some eggs left. Do you want an omelet?” I hesitated because while I do really enjoy omelets, it didn’t feel right asking for one, and she reassured me. “If you want an omelet, it’s okay. They don’t mind. Really.”
Not surprisingly, then, is the fact that an overwhelming majority of my students want to become teachers. I thought it was charming, admirable, and was left wondering if in the next 100 years or so, Tibetan children are going to be top of their classes… until I heard the voice of my favorite high school teacher in my head. It was our senior year and she told us, “Don’t become doctors or lawyers. You become those if you want money. If you’re smart, you need to be a teacher. We need smart teachers even more than we need smart doctors.”
None of my students ever expressed the desire to be a doctor. I don’t know if most of them could define the word “lawyer” without giving a Tibetan or Hindi translation. The two big professions they vied for was teaching and a governmental position. Sometimes it seemed like that was really all that they could hope for, unless they managed to score a visa to a foreign country where they could start all over, usually at the “bottom of the barrel,” as one friend told me. (This is not to say that there are not Tibetan students currently studying to be doctors; it should be noted that Sarah College is a place of higher-education, with the end result being a B.A. in Tibetan Studies, rather than something more applied like medical science or traditional dance. The statistics would change drastically if you polled students at those institutions, of which there are a few in the Tibetan diaspora in India and other countries, like Switzerland.)
My friend Ugyen knows exactly what he wants to be when he grows up. An astronaut.
“The first Tibetan astronaut?” Yup. He’s even sent e-mails to important people in the business, asking for advice.
American kids want to be so many things when they grow up. Teachers, fire fighters, artists, ballerinas– yes, even astronauts. Still, the very idea of a Tibetan astronaut dazzled me. All I had to do was look around me: science classes were being taught by American professors in the building across from the guesthouse, an idea that’s only come to fruition in the last ten years or so, as His Holiness the Dalai Lama and others have called for science education for monks and nuns, many of whom have never studied science at all. And here they were, studying science in Himachal Pradesh, India, a mostly rural state in India, and in Sarah College itself, facing the Dhauladhar ranges to the north and the flat plains to the south.
Tibetans have been in exile for 50 years, and this was the first Tibetan I’ve heard of who has his heart, and eyes, set on the stars. And, quite possibly, the first thirteen-year-old who I actually believe has the courage, intelligence, and drive to actually accomplish his life-long goal.
Today is the 40th anniversary of the success of Apollo 11, which was the first manned moon mission, best known for putting the first man on the moon. Some might call it a waste of money, particularly future trips to the moon. It can be endlessly debated, but what can’t be debated is the impact that “one small step for man, one great leap for mankind” had on the planet. It effectively broke the bar of imagination, allowing children everywhere to dream that one day, they too would be cavorting with all the imaginary moon monsters. We should feel no shame in encouraging our children to go after whatever their hearts call them to, whether it’s the classroom, operating room, Olympic stage, or the rocky red landscape of Mars.
The Tibetan culture might benefit from taking this lesson to heart. While it’s true that they are automatically disadvantaged because of their refugee status, a status they are told is written on their foreheads from the day they were born, they should also be encouraged to go after what they desire in life. Too often, I saw the refugee status make my students think twice about dreaming big. While it’s a huge part of their identity and something they may never escape, it should not be the overriding factor of their lives, even if they have to battle against it at every step of the way. I will support my students, my friends, no matter what they wish to accomplish in life, from being an early childhood teacher to zooming around in space and eating freeze-dried ice cream.
Returning Home From Exile 