As home to the Tibetan Government in Exile and the Dalai Lama’s monastery, Dharamsala attracts a unique combination of scholars, activists, tourists, nomads, and spiritual seekers. It is intriguing and exciting to be part of the mix and to witness a small piece of Tibet’s struggle for a free state. Last Saturday, I was spending some time in the reading room of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, enjoying a book on the exile community in Dharamsala. After only a few pages, I was startled by a déjà vu sensation as the author related experiences that came eerily close to my own. He mentioned staying in a hotel I pass quite regularly and frequenting a cafe I recently stopped in for a cup of tea during an unexpected rain shower. I recognized the street names and could supplement the text with my own memories of sights, smells, and sounds. I then began reading a chapter about the author’s time working in the very reading room where I was sitting. He described the students absorbed in their books, as I was at the time, and the people circling the outside of the library building, carrying their prayer beads and chanting mantras. Through the open window, I could see and hear those very things. The experience was a poignant reminder that people and places I now consider a routine part of my day are in fact extraordinary parts of Tibet’s ever-evolving history.

I had a similar realization while participating in a conversational English exercise at Gu-Chu-Sum, an association of ex-political prisoners from Tibet. Six afternoons a week, the Gu-Chu-Sum organization hosts anyone who wishes to join ex-political prisoners and their families to facilitate informal English practice since they have been barred from educational opportunities in Tibet. During my latest visit, I spoke with a nun who related in broken English the story of her monastery’s desecration, her pleas to the Chinese government for relief, her subsequent imprisonment, and finally her escape to India. She and another nun spent nearly a month walking across the snowy Himalayas until they crossed the border into Nepal and received assistance from the Tibetan refugee community there. Though the facts were not new to me, helping the nun put her narrative into a second language as she struggled to pronounce the unfamiliar sounds of her all-too-familiar story brought the experience to life in a way no book or film could.

I sympathized with the nun’s frustration when she mispronounced the foreign consonant and vowel combinations of English. On several occasions, she had to spell a word for me before I could understand its meaning, but when I said the word aloud, she couldn’t tell that I was pronouncing it any differently than she had been. My Tibetan language class evokes the same confusion for me because there are so many letters that sound almost the same, except for tiny tonal variations that make all the difference. My teacher keeps telling me that my tongue isn’t far enough back on the roof of my mouth to make a few of the sounds, but I’m fairly certain it’s touching my tonsils! I’ve made significant progress in reading and writing the script, but a basic greeting in Tibetan exhausts my conversational ability. Unfortunately, the example sentences in my textbook tend to involve yaks, yak butter, and snow mountains – none of which arise as topics of discussion in my day-to-day activities here. I’m hoping to diversify my vocabulary a bit soon, but even now, I’ve found that a smile and Tibetan greeting go a long way in putting people at ease when I need to approach them for my project.

After my Tibetan class Monday morning, I saw one of my former classmates in a cafe near the nun’s home. She is a local and already speaks Tibetan fluently but is taking classes to learn to read and write it. She’s also very anxious to improve her English. We talked for a bit and decided to meet at the cafe again Saturday morning so I can teach her some more English, and perhaps we can include some Tibetan conversation as well for a nice linguistic exchange. Her son lives in the Tibetan Children’s Village here, and she invited me to visit him with her on Sunday, which will be a great step forward as I delve a bit further into my Departmental Honors research. The Tibetan diaspora has developed several residential schools in India, and they seem to be instrumental in passing on Tibetan culture to future generations of children born outside of Tibet. In light of my research thesis, I am very interested to learn the role of mothers in this context since the children live and study outside the home.