Village Initiatives

August 1, 2009 | Category: Improvements | News by: Sandy W. (volunteer)

During my visit this summer, I’ve been privileged to get to join in the beginnings of an exciting new outreach initiative of Gatsal. While visiting the villages to scout for children this July, Lobsang began networking and meeting with local teachers, trying to better understand the nature of the issues within their individual communities and how a group of people working together could most effectively address the roots of these problems. It’s not enough to have our little plot of incredible garden, feel inspired and uplifted, and then not look out at the suffering and desperate need so many families face in nearby villages. So many children who need help are unable to come to Gatsal, and Lobsang is really seriously trying to figure out how Gatsal can come together with the village communities, to both meet their immediate needs of survival and help them in the long term to break out of the cycle of poverty. He’s held a couple of meetings with local teachers this summer, and is working on a survey initiative to document the population, school situation, and specific needs of each village in Tawang district.

He’s also working on curriculum for a Youth Program in the summer of 2010, which will include both local Monpa youth and visiting participants from America.  It will be centered on the cultivation of compassion and its active implementation. The at-Gatsal portion of the program would be a beginning, emphasizing continued activism and fundraising for a specific project after returning home (for the American youth), and then local implementation of that project for the Monpa participants. It would be both exceptional for the village itself, and also an incredible chance to involve the older kids at Gatsal, model compassion in action, and show them really that one can go out and make a difference.

So that’s how I’ve come to see how what I thought of as Jhamtse Gatsal is really only one part of what Jhamtse Gatsal is and does. It is growing in reputation: people from all over are becoming aware of the community, and it is becoming a strong center, leader, and model within the district. It’s a spark of change, whose ripples are going to spread far beyond the edges of the school community itself, and it’s an incredible and heartwarming thing to witness.


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