By Alex Moore
Mcleod Ganj is a mountain village in Northern India and the home of His Holiness the Dali Lama, the Tibetan government and a sizable population of about 8,000 Tibetans, all exiles.
I am spending two weeks here, volunteering and living in a Tibetan home. My Tibetan home-stay family is fabulous. My mom, Ama La, is cute as can be: she speaks great English but cannot read or write; she learned entirely from hosting students over the years. My dad, Pa La, is older and speaks no English. He just paces or sits there cutely with his prayer beads. He is chubby with a big, round Tibetan face, small, friendly eyes and life-well-lived wrinkles. He has short, white stubble on his head and face and a pouted, contented expression. I cannot exchange a word with him, but I love him anyway.
Ama La came here when she was five and has been here most of her life, but her husband did not escape to India in exile until he was 19. There are some pretty harrowing stories of escapes out of Tibet; in the Conversational English classes, one of the students said he trekked through Tibet's snowy mountains for 21 days in hiding to make it over the Nepalese border before coming to Mcleod Ganj. This story is not an anomaly; this is the norm, I have learned.
My parents have six grown children, all of whom live away from home. Among them are a monk, a doctor and a son studying in England right now on one of two scholarships given to Tibetan students jointly from the English and Tibetan governments. They are such proud parents!
Their house seems very, very nice. I imagine that Ama and Pa La's children take very good care of them. It is cement with real glass windows, painted walls and wood-patterned sticky focus paper on the floor. They have a mini wooden elk head on the wall (which cracks me up) and a bathroom with tile floors, a western toilet, a mirror and even a shelf with a variety of toiletries. The bathroom is complete with toilet paper. I assure you, this is well off.
They have a shiny 16"x20" Trinton Sony television that they are constantly watching world news on. I have realized that the TV is the center of life for many of our Tibetan host families, with good reason. For the past half a century, these poor people have been clinging onto hope, waiting for help. What a way to live-constantly waiting, in an in-between state. They have their own local Tibetan station with constant information on the Dali Lama and the latest influx of refugees. Roughly 6,000 exiles leave Tibet each year, and today Tibetans are outnumbered by Chinese on their own land.
Within 10 minutes of talking, my host mom and I were already commemorating and congratulating each other on Obama's win. For them, it is seen as one more small window of hope that the world will become better. It is disheartening that these people must pay such close attention to what is happening in the world around them when only 60 years ago they were living in the dark ages, stuck in the Tibet plateaus with no electricity, real roads or even the use of the wheel.
They went from complete seclusion to full emersion; what world issues would have interested them? I hate politics. I wish that I could sleep at night and ignore them altogether. But since my country's decisions and my culture so profoundly affect the entire world, I am obliged to care. The Tibetans, on the other hand, care even though they affect no one.