Dharmashala Drawing Circle of Life
Patty Winter shares her experience every bit a volunteer at local school, and as a dharma practitioner trying to exist of benefit to others and make sense of it all.
Winter is a nurse and Zen practitioner who traveled from her home in Ashland, Oregon, to Dharamsala to volunteer with an arrangement called Tong-Len. It was started by a group of Tibetan refugees who wanted to give something dorsum to the local customs that had given them refuge after they were forced to flee their homeland during the Chinese invasion of Tibet. The founders also recognized that while a number of aid agencies were working with Tibetan refugees, little was being done to aid the impoverished Indian families living in the surrounding slums:
Traveling to lower Dharamsala on a bus one can see an body of water of black plastic undulating across a dry out river drainage in the center of the town. These are theslums where 700 displaced people, 300 of them children, live in iii culturally separated groups. Nosotros walked in over mounds of gravel, one-time pipes and wire, backside a broken brick wall opening into the clay and plastic forest. I think to myself that I would never be able to walk through here without Wendy, my 74 year old Italian guide and a Tong-Len volunteer of four years. My thinking is clouded by my cultural perspective and a lack of context for what I am seeing. I feel a tinge of fright for "my" safety. Then, I suddenly call up, "Who is this 'my' that thinks she needs more than safe than these people who reside here. I am not the one living here. I have my Columbia Sportswear pants on and my ii-yr former Merrill boots with make clean bright white socks that insulate me against the filth. I tin can shower in just a few hours. Hither, the river dried upwardly early on this twelvemonth and the monsoons are non due for 2 months. No place to wash or do the clothes for these ones. I wanted to be naked, not literally, just to rid myself of this importance with my Western clothing and my Western mind. I was not able to find the thread of self-possession until I sat with a immature male child who was equally if a shadow.
As nosotros walk in, Wendy is greeted past a teen on crutches. She reaches into her wallet and pulls out 500 rupees ($x.00 The states dollars) and wishes him well. Not long ago this young homo was repairing shoes in Mcleod Ganj simply now he is on crutches from leprosy ulcers on his legs. Wendy has non seen him working for some time. He walks us through a maze of dusty, uneven gravel paths, through plastic structures, to one, in a sea, of black plastic lean-to structures. This is the school, ane black plastic 30×30 tent supported by sticks that looks like all of the other structures as far as I can run across. I count 29 children of various ages, sitting down on a large dusty mat, ane mom and her two children, an Indian teacher named Vehoes and another Italian volunteer who is about 25-30 years sometime. It is impossible to tell the age of these kids. All are malnourished, the contour of their bones outlined by brown skin. Nigh are caked in dirt from head to toe and hair matted to their heads in unintentional dread locks formed from not washing and brushing. The clay was so thick on iii of the children that it was hard to encounter where their pare stopped and their clothes began. Suddenly the teacher has anybody line up and we begin the children'southward tune, "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, Knees and Toes," except the teachers exercise not know the tune so they speak it instead of sing it.
Nosotros then sit in a circumvolve and each 1 introduces themselves with another vocal, "What is your proper name piffling Bee," and then one child says, "my proper name is …" and we all answer, "Your name is…" I am still feeling make clean, white, and fancy. I want to be naked, freed from this separation that exists nigh heavily in "my" listen but yet non able to shake it off. Soon the former round wooden tables are unstacked and 7 children gather around them. Wendy and I tear pages from a coloring book and laissez passer out crayons. Each child, each one, waits patiently without grabbing and with no concern for a certain color, receives a crayon and a page and begins to colour. The sheets are the English alphabet with pictures depicting things that begin with the letter of the alphabet, such equally H is for house, and a nice picture of a gabled dwelling unlike anything these kids have seen before, or may never come across in their lives.
I tentatively discover my way down onto the dusty rug. Getting dusty dress was not a problem, only a function of existence in Anywhere, India. My identity was shaky, "Who am I here?" My heart was questioning, "Can I open plenty to meet all of it, the dirt, the disordered hair and the open wondering, matted optics? How tin I assist with this alphabet and coloring?"
Finally, I notice my place next to a one of the three children that I described before. He has a green crayon, a flat affect and nix still on his page. I enquire, in a mode, if I tin bear witness him. My big white clean hand holds his delicate, dirt encrusted mitt and I brainstorm to show him the lines. No upshot. Then, on his ain, he slowly lifts his hand to the eye of the page, puts the crayon down, and lets the gravity of his elbow pull the mark of the crayon down the folio two-3 inches in a weak, faint squiggle before lifting it again and repeating information technology. I move in closer to him. He rubs his cervix often and I discover snot running down his olfactory organ. His fingers are terribly bony and he looks to be about four years old but I bet he is 8. I presume that he may accept a fever past the way he keeps rubbing his neck. His face is completely absent-minded of expression until I praise his lines and so a brief smiling and wide eyes await back. My clothes are beginning to autumn away now.
Another i of the three encrusted ones sits on the other side. She is a chip older and with the same bony fingers. She tin colour. I draw circles for her to make full in. Still, most of my attention is with the boy. Information technology is as if he has disappeared, absent, already gone in a style, but no he is here sitting close to me. His invisibility is loud in my senses. The children around our tabular array don't seem to notice him. I conclude that he may exist invisible with just three teachers to give attention to the 28 others. He may sit here completely unnoticed. I am glad for these few hours where I can just be with his absence in my way, a manner similar to the energy that I offering every bit I am sitting with the dying who are likewise not absent. At times I feel tears welling in my eyes (and at present as I write this) as I sit here under the black plastic awning. I say to myself, "Not here! How could I shed a tear here! I don't alive like this day later twenty-four hour period. I am not the ane that should be crying." The tears experience big-headed. I will cry later in the safety of my clean sheets and my organized closets."
Before long an older, girl arrives who speaks quite a lot of Hindi simply no English language and nosotros find our manner to communicate. I start showing her how to write the letters and pronounce them. Simply soon we are drawing stick figures, copying each other dorsum and forth and adding more item each time – a confront, a brim, she adds easily and feet, I add hair. Nosotros are feeling playful together every bit nosotros discover how clever each of us can be with stick figures. Soon we are drawing clouds and the sun. My clouds have soft circular fluffy edges her clouds are jagged. The monsoons are coming soon, she lives in a drainage, in the dirt and nether black plastic. I am naked now and equalized with one child to the right, one to the left, the bright 1 in front end cartoon jagged clouds and me.
Others begin showing me their work, some of the older, cleaner, brighter ones who are learning to color within the lines. Fifty-fifty the 1 mother has been coloring and she holds up her page for approval. I praise them, encourage them and still a portion of my attending is with the disappearing one. What will his future exist? I go the stiff feeling he may not live into a future. His life free energy is so low. I assume that if he walked away from camp perchance nobody would even know. Where are his intendance providers?
Soon the colors and papers are collected without statement and with a lot of aid from the children. I can sense the gratitude in their activity of helping put things abroad and their lack of argument – there is not even a hint of disappointment that coloring time is over.
Wendy pulls out biscuits (cookies) from her bag and asks that I laissez passer them around. My hands are dirty and I think I should launder them earlier handing out the nutrient. Suddenly my clothes have popped back into identify every bit I put one small biscuit into 29 bony fingered, filthy hands. Each kid says, "Thank you." I say, "Y'all're Welcome." Providing a "good case" for manners I call up. Ane small cookie and no i asks for more.
Later on this Wendy and I brand our mode back through the plywood floored tents, with mats. Nosotros pass three older women and a man lying on a mattress-less metal spring bed. There is a bony dog under the bed and Wendy asks that they hold the dog as nosotros walk by. My Merrills are back on my white socked feet. My Columbia Sportswear pants are hanging from my torso intact. My periwinkle sun hat and my $fifty.00 clip-on sunglasses are protecting me from the harshness of the day. We circle back around the cement wall, over the wires and pipes and look at the bus cease where Wendy pulls out the paw sanitizer. We rub this in, creating a clammy clay as information technology mixes with the filth on our hands. We rinse with our clean drinking h2o. A routine that Wendy has done for iv days a week, 4 months a year for the last four years.
I arrive back at my guest firm on the 3rd floor with the view, strip naked and shower. Throwing my sportswear and socks in the bucket for washing I caput to dinner for hot soup at the Peace Café.
This feel came about during my offset journeying to McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala, Republic of india when I was introduced to Wendy. Sharing a tabular array at the Peace Café, over a bowl of hot thugkpa she introduced me to the benevolent organization, Tong-Len. Founded past Tibetan refugees, this organization returns India's generosity of refuge by offering educational and health based programs to displaced families who reside in the local slum hamlet. Wendy is retired and lives on a pension. For iv-half dozen months of the final four years she has left her Italian home to exist a "Teacher" in i of the black plastic covered tents in the slums of lower Dharamsala. Over dinner we bundled for me to accompany her to the slums the very next day.
Source: https://www.lionsroar.com/postcard-from-dharamsala/
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