The Best Thing I Can Do For My Country: Part Six

This is the sixth and final part of the series “The Best Thing I Can Do For My Country.”

Read Part One.

Read Part Two.

Read Part Three.

Read Part Four.

Read Part Five.

The Best Thing I Can Do For My Country: Part Five

This is part five of the series “The Best Thing I Can Do For My Country.”

Read Part One.

Read Part Two.

Read Part Three.

Read Part Four.

The Best Thing I Can Do For My Country: Part Four

This is part four of the series “The Best Thing I Can Do For My Country.”

Read Part One.

Read Part Two.

Read Part Three.

The Best Thing I Can Do For My Country: Part Three

This is part three of the series “The Best Thing I Can Do For My Country.”

Read Part One.

Read Part Two.

The Best Thing I Can Do For My Country: Part Two

This is part two of the series “The Best Thing I Can Do For My Country.” To read part one, click here.

The Best Thing I Can Do For My Country

“Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

As I’ve mentioned before, a majority of my students wished to become teachers or work for the Tibetan Government in Exile after graduation. This was how they conceptualized “doing something” for their country, a country many had escaped from as children and others had never seen.

But under the surface, there were other things they deemed as “good” for their country, and those things fascinated me more than their educational or pseudo-political goals. They ranged from taking up arms to fight the Chinese to marrying Tibetan and having eight children (“a minimum” a friend once told me).

It was those responses I was trying to elicit from my students when I wrote the topic, “The best thing I can do for my country is…” on the chalkboard. The responses I received did not mention any of these aforementioned things, although when I asked the students what they thought about having eight children, the men in the classroom usually said they wanted to have a lot of children, and the women had looks of quiet terror on their faces.

Instead, the responses showed a deep sense of responsibility that does not seem to match up with the external options within reach of a Tibetan refugee. At the same time, their concerns include the preservation of their language, customs, and culture at large– things that most of us will never have to worry about.

Over the next few days, I’ll be posting scanned versions of my students’ responses to the topic “The best thing I can do for my country is…”, along with a transcribed and slightly edited version.

The World’s First Tibetan Astronaut

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.

Tenzin Dolma-la

Photo taken by one of the Emory University students.

This is a post in support of one of my students, Lobsang Delek.

Let me say here that talent shows at Sarah College will blow you away. Sarah is about the size of my high school, and we had nowhere near as many talented people. Some of the guys and girls are amazing singers; we’ve got poets and songwriters; we’ve got dancers… It’s somewhat ironic because up the road from Sarah is the Thangtong Lhugar Performing Arts school.

My friend Annie played a song called “Tenzin Dolma-la” for me, shocked that I had never heard it. “He goes to Sarah, you know.”

When she later pointed him out to me, my first reaction was, “He’s my student!”

Excuses, Excuses…

Students at Sarah College are required to write excuse notes if they are not in class.

At a certain point in the year, when I started to suspect that students were skipping my class more than usual, I had asked where a certain student was and someone in the class pointed to a note on the desk.

I held it up. I can somewhat read the U-chen font, which is the most common font used for printing books (it’s the Times New Roman of Tibetan), but most of the Tibetan notes were written in U-me, a kind of Tibetan cursive that barely resembles U-chen (actually, it’s kinda like the Webdings of Tibetan, if you’re unfamiliar with the Tibetan language).

I explained to the class that I couldn’t read U-me and then proceeded to try to translate a name written in U-chen on another note, causing the students to laugh at me.

I told them, if you can write a note for your Tibetan teachers, you can write a note for me. I further explained that it didn’t have to be all fancy; it could just read “Dear teacher, I am sick. Love,” and I called the name of a student who was half-asleep.

These are some of the excuse notes I’ve received.