Why did you decide to volunteer with Jhamtse Gatsal in India?
I’d been active in “community service,” especially regarding issues of “international development,” throughout high school. After I graduated, I had the chance to travel to Jhamtse Gatsal with some friends of my mom’s and was excited to see first-hand the processes that I’d long been so interested in.
I boarded my plane with this idea that I was going over there to help, but in actuality, I came back having gained and grown unspeakably. I had been welcomed with such generosity and uplifted in so many casual moments of celebration of life and community. I left with a completely inverted conception of “service”—the “world-saving” I had previously thought of as a unidirectional arrow, I realized only ever happens in mutual exchange and connection—and found myself uprooting fundamental assumptions I’d never thought to question—completely undermining my conception of “development,” for instance, as I noticed skills and understandings in which I found the way of life in the school and the villages a lot more developed than our society here.
Describe your day to day activities as a volunteer.
I quickly wound up completely integrated into the daily life of the school, and often slept over in the family houses with the children, waking up when they did at 5 am to clean their space and greet the day. From then, it could be a whirlwind hodgepodge of a thousand different activities (there was always plenty going on in a home for 80 children!). I’d have breakfast and chai with the kids and staff, teach classes, help in the office, chop vegetables and be taught how to make Tibetan steamed tingmos with my friends in the kitchen, hand wash laundry while singing and splashing with the house mothers and kids, and spend the afternoon recess braiding hair, playing soccer, or learning Monpa songs from the children.
After a delicious dinner of belly-warming thukpa noodle soup or rice and mustard greens we had harvested from the garden earlier in the day, I’d watch the kids’ evening practice for their upcoming Annual Celebration recital (and dance in the background, trying frantically to mirror the precisely graceful rotation of their wrists and subtle mastery of rhythm and weight… often to much amusement for the rest of the audience), and retire with them to the family houses for a bedtime story, or lullaby, or late-night whispered chat with some of the older girls about our families and favorites and fears, and find myself waking up to the sunrise and their excited smiles the next morning.
How has this experience helped you grow personally and professionally?
I frequently describe that first visit to Jhamtse Gatsal by telling friends and family how I fell in love with all the kids and staff, with the entire vision and mission of the school, everything it is doing in the region, and just the spirit of love and compassion that permeate every aspect of the community. I have been back during the summers since then, and hope to move there for longer after I graduate college. Knowing where I want to be has certainly helped me cater my curriculum to develop skills and knowledge that will help me contribute best.
But even had it not been that my visit to Jhamtse Gatsal laid out a plan of particularly where I wanted to be, my time traveling in such a different world and becoming integrated so tightly into such a beautiful community have indescribably helped me to get the most out of my time at college. On a most fundamental level, just the acute awareness of how lucky I am in so many ways has motivated me viscerally to make absolutely the most of the privilege of my education, so I can best pay it forward and share it with others.
Being more tuned in to what I want to do with my life has also helped me take advantage of particularly relevant opportunities at college. And my radically deepened, made-complex conceptions of “development” and “service” have allowed me to engage with discussion of these topics in class much more profoundly and critically, and my personal experience with the issues I learn about academically, and the friends’ faces I envision when various abstract ideas come up in class, have made distant topics much more relevant and tangible.
My time at Jhamtse Gatsal has both sculpted my thoughts on what I want to do with my life in the future and changed the way I look at and interact with the world in every moment right now. While a lot of my friends have lately been feeling anxious about where they’ll end up and what to do next, I feel so, so lucky to have had this direction guiding and inspiring me through the last few years. It has made every minute since that first summer trip more meaningful, purposeful, and rich.
