A Story of Karma by Michael Schauch

Author:Michael Schauch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771604680
Publisher: RMB | Rocky Mountain Books
Published: 2020-07-24T18:35:58+00:00

Fifteen

We had nearly given up hope. Weeks of searching went by, and Chantal and I could not find a suitable school for Karma. We had searched during our remaining days in Kathmandu, and we continued searching long after returning to Canada. Days turned into weeks, and weeks soon became a month. The problem wasn’t finding a school in Nepal; it was finding the right school in Nepal. It was imperative to find a school that would honour Karma’s Tibetan Buddhist roots and her ethnic and cultural heritage, which were vastly different from the predominantly Hindu culture of Nepal.

We also sought a school that would help her transition from remote village life into the bigger world around her. She had scarcely been outside a five-kilometre radius from her village, which had a population of around 700 people. She hadn’t even seen a bicycle before, let alone experienced a big chaotic city like Kathmandu, with its cars and motorbikes and a population of some 1.5 million people. And, on top of this, the school would have to provide a safe environment for boarding students. Many of the schools we encountered were either large government schools with large class sizes and a mostly Hindu cultural orientation, or private schools that were likely to be filled with students from high-ranking Hindu castes and the children of expats. We knew enough to understand that most of Nepal still operated on the caste system, and that the mountain people, who were from the Buddhist minority and could be easily identified as such by name and appearance, would be looked down on and discriminated against if not in the right environment.

And then, during one of Chantal’s late-night searches, Google finally came to the rescue. “Mike, you have to check this out!” Chantal’s eyes were fixed on her computer screen. Up popped the website for the Shree Mangal Dvip Boarding School. The school was located in the Kathmandu valley and situated near the great Boudhanath Stupa, a major Buddhist pilgrimage site that was the largest and easily the most glorious chorten in the world.

At the top of the page was a picture of Tibetan-looking children, snotty-nosed and sunburnt, clad in tattered clothes – looking just like the children we’d seen in the remote villages of Nar and Phu. “Education for the forgotten children of the high Himalaya of Nepal,” read the photo caption. The school was founded in 1987 by the Venerable Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, the ninth incarnation of the great Thrangu tulku. (We had no idea what this meant at the time, but it sounded impressive.) Thrangu Rinpoche is a high-ranking lama born in Tibet in 1933, who fled to India in 1959. He had since built monasteries all over the world and founded the Shree Mangal Dvip Boarding School – SMD – specifically for the children in the upper Nepal Himalayan belt. These were the children from some of the most inaccessible, impoverished parts of Nepal, the ones who fell through the cracks. They came from

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