Talk for White Heron Buddhist
Sangha-San Luis Obispo, CA.
August 25, 2012 (click here to read more)
By Jan Sprague, HANDS in
Nepal
“Buddhism and Social
Activisim Through Service To Others”
“In getting ready for this
talk tonight, I had the most difficulty in thinking about how to start-For the
past five years, my “other” job has been supporting my son in his efforts to
run a small non profit organization he calls HANDS in Nepal-Hands standing for
‘Humanitarian Acts in Nepal Developing Schools.’
We have had so many
experiences while building schools and a library in Nepal, and then tutoring
English to Tibetan refugees, and then my side branch, buying sewing machines
for poor women , that it all seems a big stew pot of lots of ambitions that
have grown out of our respect and love for the teachings of Lord Buddha.
Then it occurred to me I
really don’t know much about social activism and Buddhism, except that I have
put the words of two respected Buddhist teachers into action in my life, and
have found their words to ring true in bringing about my own feelings of
contentment.
The Dalai Lama says:
‘If you want others to be happy,
practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. ‘
I keep that quote up in my
classroom and it has become the number one rule for my life.
One the Dalai Lama’s favorite
authors is Shantideva
Shantideva … an 8th-century Indian Buddhist scholar at Nalanda University
and an adherent of the Madhyamaka
philosophy of Nagarjuna.
Shantideva is most well known for his book “
The Way of the Bohdisattva”
He writes:
‘Through these actions now performed
And all the virtues I have gained
May all the pain of every living being
Be wholly scattered and destroyed
For all those ailing in the world
Until their every sickness has been healed
May I myself become for them
The doctor nurse, the medicine’
Now I am not so full of ego to feel that I am
capable or able to literally follow the teaching of a great bodhisattva like
Shantideva or the Dalai Lama-but why not try and see if it’s true that working
for compassion, peace and to eliminate suffering can possible be a wonderful
journey towards Nirvana, or at least a wonderful way to spend this current
life.
So there I was sweating like a pig on a fire, walking
in a hot, rice patty landscape of the lower Himalayas in Nepal, legs numb from
hiking, tired, and feeling like the sky was pressing on my head with heat and
humidity. This wasn’t nirvana, it was samsara, but I was on my way to see the
first school my son built in a village in an area known as the Ganesh Himalayas,
in a district called Dhading, and I was determined to keep putting one soggy
foot in front of the other until I got there.
To get there, we had to get up very early,
catch a local public bus crammed with all sorts of living beings in various
states of health-goats and people on top when it was too full to fit anyone
else inside, and bumped and churned our way on Nepal’s notorious only highway
where sheer drop-offs and drivers playing chicken with oncoming traffic make
you a believer in Shiva in no time, and then unbending yourself enough to
disembark and wrangle a fee for a 4 x 4 Indian made jeep to take you and
numerous other villagers on another 4-6 hr. ride on dirt trails, where you once
again unravel and stagger to a simple hut, (by now it’s dark) where for a few Nepali
rubees you can get tea overly sweetened with sugar and a bowl of noodles, and a
bed roll on a mat of straw, or sleep on the table outside under an amazenly
brilliant blanket of stars.
In the morning we began our ascent up ancient
stone steps, and for those who have hiked in the Himalayas, you know what I
mean by ascent-it is straight up and up for a long, long time. People live
here, perched on the sides of these amazing mtns. In homes that sometimes look
like any minute they will topple down the mountainside, and some do during the
heavy monsoon rains.
The people in these remote villages are
amazing, to say the least. Their sheer will to live in one of the most extreme
environments I have ever seen puts our spoiled life to shame, and the very few
material possessions I saw made me realize how simple their life really is. But
the one thing they do crave is education, for their children, and a dream that
life will somehow be better for the next generation because their children will
be able to read and write. That was what we came to do and share with them, and
two schools and one library later, we feel satisfied that we made that dream a
reality for two villages who now have that opportunity .
Building schools in remote Himalayan villages
was only one part, we realized, in bringing education to Nepal. Children in the city, who live in poverty in
this part of the world, work hard-in hotels, doing laundry, becoming tea wallahs,
rag pickers, and worse.
Danny had started his adventures in Nepal
working at an orphanage called Buddhist Child Home in Kathmandu, and we had
become frequent visitors to the home of some 48 children, run by a middle-class
Nepali woman named Durga Manali. Durga had started the home with two children,
and subsequently, had police and others in authority bring her more. Sometimes
the children were rescued in child trafficking raids and brought to her home,
because the children are too young to remember where they came from originally,
and sometimes Durga told me, the youngest children are from beggars, who tie
them up at temples and leave them, hoping a kind-hearted stranger will take
them home.
We began to raise money for scholarships for
the older kids at the orphange, so they may stay in school, and continue to
this day to track and support 6 of the older kids through HANDS in Nepal.
But I didn’t want to stop there, and while my
son felt a need to strike out to more remote areas than that, where poverty and
lack of schools have created a backwash of ignorance that feeds a terrible
state of child trafficking, I turned my sights to the third world squalor of
Kathmandu and the struggles of street children and women living in poverty
there.
One thing I noticed in my trips to Kathmandu
was that women seemed to make up the majority of the back-breaking physically
demanding construction force. Over and over I was incredulous to see thin,
scrawny women who looked mal nourished to say the least, often with a baby tied
on the back and small children nearby, lifting heavy baskets to their heads and
hauling sand, cement, rocks, mud, even bricks to and thro job sites. It was
heart-breaking to see their struggles in the heat, and often two women manning
a shovel, one digging, the other pulling it up with a rope tied to the shovel
end. And then heaving the dirt into a basket that another women who thrust up
on her back, adjust a head trump line and carry off like a mule.
After reading the book, Half The Sky, where
they talk about how much a difference a treadle sewing machine can make in the
life of a poor woman, I looked into buying sewing machines in Kathmandu. I
found a funky, ancient shop, all chalk a block stacked with machines of various
age and style, and found for $150 usd, one could buy a fairly good heavy duty
treadle machine that came on a table.
I bought two the first year and through Durga,
found two women who were desperate for an opportunity to start a tailoring
business.
After meeting two lovely young people completing
yoga training in Kathmandu, who were interested in how to help poor women, I
arranged for them to buy and deliver a machine once I had returned to the
states.
This past summer, I bought two more and with
Durga we are starting a small microfinance project where poor women can apply
for a machine and pay back the original purchase cost a few dollars at a time.
The exciting caveat to this project was that if
a poor woman has the means to earn enough money for food and shelter, her children,
including her daughters, get to go to school. Now I felt like we were really
getting somewhere. I began to explore the local markets looking for women
sewing products I could buy to support them, and bring back to the States to
sell. I literally stumbled upon two cooperatives, both made up of Tibetan
refugees, and have been working them to design and make computer bags and now
ipad bags to sell in the US.
And then I found the women of the Jawalekeil
Tibetan Refugee Center, who weave yak hair blankets on large, foot operated
looms. The blankets I brought back were loved by those who saw them, and they
sell well enough for me to return each year to the camp and purchase more. When
I show up, the women are very happy and give me many “Tahsi Deleks” and press
my left forearm, which is tattooed with the words Free Tibet in Tibetan, onto
their forehead. The tattoo was a gift from a Tibetan refugee in Dharmasla who
wanted to give me something in return for the help we had given him. He did it
with a bamboo stick and ink, while the two of us sat across from each other on
the not very clean floor of his tiny, musky sleeping quarters, decorated only
with his hand-painted thangkas that he had carried out of Tibet with him.
But what about the girls? You hear so often
about girls and sex trafficking and it’s a very real problem in Nepal and
India, where poverty drives parents and the girls themselves to desperate
means.
I found out about a school run by the Tibetan
nun Ani Choying in a town above Kathamndu called Pharping. The school, called
the Arya Tara school for Poor and Destitute Girls, had been built and started
by Ani Choying to house the most desperate and poorest of girls, those who are
discarded and tossed out for reasons as minute as not having enough money to
feed everyone, or a new marriage and the girl not wanted or needed anymore. Ani
Choying (she herself the victim of a brutal and abusive childhood) has to
measure and weigh the needs of each girl, and takes only those of the most dire
circumstances, and now has 50 girls from age 5 to in to their teens. We decided supporting a girl here was a
worthy effort and raised money to pay one years support for a 5 year old “nun”
named Urgan Dolma-or Urgi for short.
ON the other side of the border, there is Dharamsala,
India, now the home of HHDL and site of the Tibetan gov’t in exhile. It wasn’t
long before we began to incorporate visits to Dharmasala and McLeod gang into
our yearly trips to Nepal. While Nepal was a tough, gritty, dirty, extreme place
in its poverty, Dharmasala seemed alive, vital, beautiful and refreshing in the
energy brought by the Tibetan people, always smiling, always spinning prayer
wheels, and always positive in their in-shakable faith of Tibetan Buddhism and
their leader, HHDL.
At first, we came as curious sightseers and
seekers of some good, solid Buddhist teachings, but we also found a way to
further our volunteering and practice here- almost everywhere we looked, there
was a funky hand-lettered sign or flyer posted on a wall that pleaded for
English teachers. One such place was called Tibet Hope Project, and it was here
we spent our afternoons in small chat circles, practicing English with Tibetan
monks and young Tibetan men and women, most who had only recently arrived out of
Tibet. Their stories were heart-breaking and just as humbling as traveling
around the back country of Nepal, stories of traveling at night over steep,
snowy Himalayan passes, trying to avoid detection by Chinese soldiers eating
grass when their tsampa ran out, taking cover in caves during snow storms, and
sometimes having to watch loved ones die on the trail or end up with amputated
fingers and toes due to extreme frost bite.
The Lha center also requested volunteers and we
signed up to be paired with Tibetans who were trying hard to learn a vocation
or further their English training to apply for jobs in India-jobs in media, computer
technology or teaching. Their strong will to learn and optimism was so
impressive, every trip I returned devoted to never complain or whine about
anything every again in my life and felt an even deeper conviction in the words
of the Buddha to work towards ending suffering for everyone, not just myself.
This year I brought books to Nepal for our
library, along with over 40 solar lights for the villages, and continued to buy
sewing machines for my sewing machine project.
But I also decided to incorporate a little “me” time into my second trip
of the year during the summer, and took a flight over to Thailand to work at an
elephant refugee camp. There I found again, an interesting way to explore my
Buddhist practice, by walking to one of the many monk chat programs in Chiang
Mai, where young novice monks sit waiting to practice English- and added a new
twist, teaching English to young Burmese mahouts in Northern Thailand.
It’s impossible to accomplish this on ones own,
and we have been blessed with compassionate and kind people along this journey
who have donated hundreds and even thousands of dollars to build our schools
and library, such as the Dworak family in Minnesota, who’s son was touched by
the poverty of Nepal on a trekking trip there, and vowed to give back in the
form of providing education. Another man, who wishes to remain anonymous, has
donated money to education projects and The Rotary
Clubs have been supportive with helping us earn grants to buy solar lamps for
our school and library in Phulkharta. Parents at my school, touched by photos I
keep on my desk, have donated money for shoes for the orphanage, this from
people who are themselves migrants and living at or below poverty level.
Students at an elementary school in Morgan Hill, Ca., held a bake sale a year
ago and sent us $800 from that sale, to go to the orphans at Buddhist Child
Home. Teacher friends have made contributions to support scholarships, and have written education grants in our honor for helping to buy books. My family and friends, as well, ever the
diligent supporters, have contributed donations towards sewing machines and
always buy a yak hair blanket when a gift is needed.
Little by little, the funds continue to trickle
in enough to keep our programs going. We are by no means at a level such as “3
Cups of Tea” author Greg Mortenson,” but it is enough, and we feel so supported
and buoyed up by those who believe enough in our mission, to ease the burden of
women and children in one of the world’s poorest countries, to keep it going.
So here now, I’d like to leave you with a short
slide show I’ve composed of images and scenes from my quote unquote “social
activism.”
Whatever you choose to do with your social
activism, however you feel your life should be used, my hope is it brings you
contentment and peace.
Thank you for this opportunity to share-and Many
Tashi Deleks to you all!
