Do come to the sponsor and friends meeting on February 21, 2011, in London at 7pm. Sponsors should have received an invitation. If not, please contact Mark Hudson. You will hear about how things are going in Herbertpur and about Tibet.
Saturday, 29 January 2011
Monday, 29 November 2010
BUS AND FLOODS, 2010
You will have read about the floods in Pakistan in the autumn of 2010. There was also extensive flooding across much of the western Himalayas in northern India, but not as bad as in Pakistan.
Herbertpur, where the Noe Tibetan Children's Home is located, has a fast flowing river nearby. This rose and burst its banks and flooded the town. A wall in the school which Pema founded, and of which she is headmistress, was knocked down, and there was other damage. Fortunately, the children's home building was not affected. Mr Mega is now trying to get the school repaired.
Meanwhile, we are raising funds to pay for a new school bus. This is essential in order to transport various children who live in distant villages to the school - or they generally cannot get to school. The Friends of the Noe Tibetan Children Home does not normally support the school, but it is doing so in this case via a special appeal. The bus will also be used sometimes for Home outings. The school bus will cost about £10,600. All donations are most welcome. Please follow this link for donating via http://www.virginmoneygiving.co.uk/ [search on 'Find a charity' with the term 'Noe'].
Herbertpur, where the Noe Tibetan Children's Home is located, has a fast flowing river nearby. This rose and burst its banks and flooded the town. A wall in the school which Pema founded, and of which she is headmistress, was knocked down, and there was other damage. Fortunately, the children's home building was not affected. Mr Mega is now trying to get the school repaired.
Meanwhile, we are raising funds to pay for a new school bus. This is essential in order to transport various children who live in distant villages to the school - or they generally cannot get to school. The Friends of the Noe Tibetan Children Home does not normally support the school, but it is doing so in this case via a special appeal. The bus will also be used sometimes for Home outings. The school bus will cost about £10,600. All donations are most welcome. Please follow this link for donating via http://www.virginmoneygiving.co.uk/ [search on 'Find a charity' with the term 'Noe'].
Friday, 13 November 2009
A VISIT TO PEMA, 2009
** FOR PHOTOGRAPHS of the Home and the children on this visit, see the blog posting below this one
Jock Dalrymple writes:
In 1996, Mark Hudson and I visited Pema and Mega. Thirteen years on, he decided it was time for him to visit again, and I agreed to join him for my tenth visit to Herbertpur, 29 years after first meeting Pema and Mega there in April 1980.
Thus it was that we boarded the relatively new Shatabdi Express in New Delhi early on the morning of Wednesday 18 February and arrived 150 miles north, in Dehra Dun, six hours later. Pema and Mega were there to greet us with all-enveloping hugs, both having aged slightly in the three years since I’d last seen them, but both retaining the ebullient warmth that is their trademark. After a laughter-laden lunch in a rather brash Punjabi Restaurant, we embarked on the hour and a half journey through the Doon Valley to Herbertpur and the first encounter with the children in the Home – a slightly tense one since initially they always appear overcome by shyness.
Over the years, I have come to know what to expect in the four days that my visits usually last. Much of the time is spent in Pema and Mega’s sparsely-furnished sitting room, off a small courtyard, talking about every subject under the sun with Pema, marvellously lively and diverse conversations that are interspersed with delicious meals prepared by Mega, and each evening by a solemn session of rum drinking and male bonding with him – while Pema warns us after every mouthful of the dangers of too much alcohol.
Then there is the concert of welcome the first night, normally a rather stilted affair as the children apparently rather reluctantly sing and dance for us. However, that always begins the thawing process; gradually they relax, we learn their names and their life-stories, and by the concert on the last night there is a totally different atmosphere as they tease each other and us, communicating an innocence and a simplicity that is matched by a capacity for laughter and fun that is infectious.
In addition, there is the visit to the school, now 950 strong, 400 metres away and the tour of the classrooms, Pema transformed into the greatly respected and rather stern Principal; the picnic with the children at the swing park by the river Yamuna (near a spot where the monkeys reveal their natural intelligence by unwrapping sweets they’ve been thrown, before eating them); and the expedition, this time to Hardwar where the Ganges reaches the great North Indian plain, offering the opportunity for us - and a few thousand others - to paddle in its sacred waters.
And yet, for all this ‘routine’, no visit disappoints; rather the opposite, with each one offering not just much that is memorable and heart-warming, but also something that is new and different - this time, for instance, Pema and especially Mega being willing to reveal much more background about their families and their own early lives in Tibet than ever before.
Mega is a Khampa, by far the largest Tibetan ethnic group, comprising 80% of all Tibetans. Khampas are traditionally fairly warlike and very direct and no nonsense: one evening Simkey, Pema and Mega’s daughter, rang from Canada, and Mega proceeded to have a conversation with his fellow Khampa son-in-law Tsering in which both of them spoke with a machine-gun like intensity, much to Pema’s amusement.
Pema says that Simkey has inherited her father’s Khampa directness: their son, Thinlay, has recently been visiting her, and has been complaining to his mother about the number of house-rules his formidable and beautiful elder sister has made him observe!
Mega’s family came from a very rural area far to the east of Lhasa, well outside the ‘Tibet Autonomous Region’. While staying with him and Pema, I was reading Patrick French’s fascinating book, ‘Tibet, Tibet’, and learnt that many ethnic Tibetans (including the present Dalai Lama) come from outside the autonomous region. One evening I asked Mega how far it had been from his home to the nearest city. He pondered and responded that Chengdu was twelve hours away…by horseback.
The twenty-one Khampa families who dominated Tibet before the Chinese takeover in 1948 owned three-quarters of the country’s land, with each family/clan possessing their own armoury. Mega belonged to one of these families.
Mega is not starry-eyed about Tibet before the Chinese invasion. He says that one of the reasons Tibet is as it is now is because of the way in the past rich Tibetans exploited poor Tibetans. Nor were the Khampas guilt-free: some Khampas disobeyed the Tibetan government in 1948 with calamitous results, while others had actually led the Chinese invaders to Lhasa. However, he is proud of the part Khampas played in the Dalai Lama’s escape and he admits to resenting the way that the present-day Dharamsala government in exile contains comparitively few Khampas, and that there are only a handful of Khampa MPs. He also feels strongly that second-generation Tibetan exiles in the West don’t seem to acknowledge and venerate the great men of the recent past who laid down their lives for their country and their people.
Pema herself is a Kongpo, who comprise only five percent of Tibetans. Kongpos are very different to Khampas, speaking a gentler dialect of Tibetan, and more urban, educated and attractive: Pema seems very proud that the last four Miss Tibets have all been Kongpos!
Pema’s father was a businessman living in the area south of Lhasa, the most fertile and mineral-rich area in Tibet (and the region that now hosts the main Chinese military bases). Her father, to whom she was very close, would take apricots, dried mushrooms, yak and sheep wool, and Tibetan spices and herbs to Burma and India to trade there, returning with Indian silk, cotton and leather shoes. Like Mega, Pema’s family, too, fled the Chinese over the Himalayas in 1959 when Pema was five or six, and settled in Darjeeling.
While she was at College, Pema became an evangelical Christian, and to her family’s horror was often out in the streets with a ‘Youth for Christ’ group. One day she returned home to find plans for a great celebration underway in her home. When she asked what the celebration was about, she was told it was for her wedding to Mega: her parents hoped that a disciplined husband twenty years older than her would ensure she was ‘well controlled!’ The rest, as they say, is history.
It was fascinating to learn all this – and to discover that there are many Khampas among the children who’ve been through the home – and that Khampas are notoriously protective of each other.
Incidentally, Pema’s faith these days has evolved somewhat: she remains a fervent believer, still fairly evangelical in approach, even if she only goes to her church in Dehra Dun occasionally, but now combining that faith with daily yoga, and with great respect for Buddhist traditions and the Dalai Lama. She meditates and prays for an hour every morning, and fasts every Monday, partly as a way of interceding for those she loves.
Over the years, Pema had always felt deeply hurt by the way her family had rejected her because of her faith. However, in the last year, she has decided that she needed - not least for her own well-being and peace of mind - to forgive her dead parents: and she has done so, she says, by an act of will - with very positive results, which have been noticed and commented on by Mega and their children.
It was good, too, to catch up on news of Simkey and Thinlay, and to speak to them both on the telephone. Simkey joined her husband Tsering two years ago in Toronto in Canada, and seems well-settled, both of them enjoying their year old daughter, Tara, and all the challenges of parenthood. Thinlay, meanwhile, is now officially betrothed to Urgen, a cousin of Tsering’s who lives in the USA, and has moved there in the last year to be closer to her. However, Thinlay wants to get better-qualified - and to find a good job (for which he will need a work permit) - before marrying her. Pema herself had been deeply upset when her beloved Thinlay joined his sister in North America, but she and Mega seem gradually to have come to terms with their children being so far away, and talk regularly with them on the phone.
At the moment it is impossible for Pema and Mega to make any plans for the future – in terms of a possible move to North America. Tibetan culture will not countenance parents moving in with a daughter’s family, so they have to wait for Thinlay to decide where he will settle before seeing what options are available for them. Anyway, although Pema thinks on balance she herself would probably choose to move in order to be close to her children, it is far from easy for elderly Tibetans with refugee passports to get permission to emigrate to North America – and she is not convinced that Mega in his mid-70’s would benefit from such an uprooting.
The latter still gets up at 4.30am every morning and is remarkably fit, spending the first half hour of the day doing exercises, but partly in the aftermath of a car crash last year even he has been beginning to feel his age, physically and psychologically.
Pema and Mega have sensibly decided that it is no longer wise to take in any more children into the Home, given their ages and health, and the relative uncertainty about their future. That said, Pema fairly recently made the decision to accept one little boy (aged six), after his parents split up: Tibetan custom is that in such cases sons go with their father, but the boy’s father is a porter in the Himalayas and unable to look after him.
The seventeen children left comprise twelve girls and five boys, including three older girls, who have a kind of ‘big sister’ role in the Home. The oldest girl composed and made a most accomplished official thank you speech to us before the party on our last night. Another, meanwhile, who is half-Indian and half-Tibetan and wants to be an air hostess, is a Vice-Prefect at the Johnson school. Indeed, one of the most touching features of any stay is the chance to observe quite how kind and supportive all the children are of each other.
However, the strongest characters in the Home seem to be a group of younger girls, all between eight and twelve: one girl, who is half-Nepalese, dances superbly, and displays great poise; another who had been selected by Mega to serve our meals throughout, possessor of a beautiful smile and a real presence; two more excellent dancers; a pretty orphan who had been abused whilst working in a Dehra Dun hotel, before being rescued from there by Pema; and finally a girl whose farther had accidentally killed himself with a grenade, who was much more relaxed and at home than during my last visit.
The boys kept more to themselves, a quiet close-knit group. However, it was good to see an intensely shy lad come out of himself on the last night, revealing an impressive dress sense as well as good foot movement on the dance floor. His two brothers are among the nine children who live with their own families but are supported by the Home.
Incidentally, the children’s singing and dancing skills are apparently honed through watching Hindi movies during the weekly 1-5pm Saturday and Sunday sessions in front of Pema and Mega’s television.
Herbertpur itself, situated as it is on a major crossroads, continues to grow – and it remains endlessly fascinating to stand on the Home’s second floor balcony and watch the world go by. Not that everything is always calm and peaceful: indeed, the town has always suffered from communal tensions. Three Sikhs were killed there after Indira Gandhi was assassinated; and it has long been a centre of the extreme Hindu group, the RSS, linked closely to the Janata party which still retains control of Uttarkhand State, of which Herbertpur is a part.
While we were staying with Pema, the District Collector visited the town as a matter of some urgency to try and settle a dispute about a pipeline which runs outside the house, after an effigy of the Chief Minister had been burnt and a mini-riot had taken place. Pema also told us of a recent incident at the school where she had to placate a Muslim deputation after one of her teachers, a Hindu, had apparently hit and bruised a Muslim pupil. And back in December 2007, she had had to postpone a planned visit from my neice after there had been a fight between some Tibetan and Indian youths - after an incident like that, she and Mega and their fellow Tibetans in the area always have to lie low in order to avoid the kind of backlash to which, as refugees, they are so vulnerable.
It requires great tact and restraint on the part of Pema and Mega - still fifty years after arriving in India having to apply annually for an extension of their permit to remain there - to negotiate these dangerous ethnic and communal currents. And yet, like everything they set their hand to, it is something they triumphantly accomplish.
Mark and I finally left on Sunday at midday. As ever, the children had all written and drawn cards of farewell: my favourite was:
This poem is for you
Rose is red
Sky is blue
Oh my sir, I like you
Go to hill
Push me not
Wherever you go
Forget me not
From your lovingly daughter
Jock Dalrymple
November 2009
Jock Dalrymple writes:
In 1996, Mark Hudson and I visited Pema and Mega. Thirteen years on, he decided it was time for him to visit again, and I agreed to join him for my tenth visit to Herbertpur, 29 years after first meeting Pema and Mega there in April 1980.
Thus it was that we boarded the relatively new Shatabdi Express in New Delhi early on the morning of Wednesday 18 February and arrived 150 miles north, in Dehra Dun, six hours later. Pema and Mega were there to greet us with all-enveloping hugs, both having aged slightly in the three years since I’d last seen them, but both retaining the ebullient warmth that is their trademark. After a laughter-laden lunch in a rather brash Punjabi Restaurant, we embarked on the hour and a half journey through the Doon Valley to Herbertpur and the first encounter with the children in the Home – a slightly tense one since initially they always appear overcome by shyness.
Over the years, I have come to know what to expect in the four days that my visits usually last. Much of the time is spent in Pema and Mega’s sparsely-furnished sitting room, off a small courtyard, talking about every subject under the sun with Pema, marvellously lively and diverse conversations that are interspersed with delicious meals prepared by Mega, and each evening by a solemn session of rum drinking and male bonding with him – while Pema warns us after every mouthful of the dangers of too much alcohol.
Then there is the concert of welcome the first night, normally a rather stilted affair as the children apparently rather reluctantly sing and dance for us. However, that always begins the thawing process; gradually they relax, we learn their names and their life-stories, and by the concert on the last night there is a totally different atmosphere as they tease each other and us, communicating an innocence and a simplicity that is matched by a capacity for laughter and fun that is infectious.
In addition, there is the visit to the school, now 950 strong, 400 metres away and the tour of the classrooms, Pema transformed into the greatly respected and rather stern Principal; the picnic with the children at the swing park by the river Yamuna (near a spot where the monkeys reveal their natural intelligence by unwrapping sweets they’ve been thrown, before eating them); and the expedition, this time to Hardwar where the Ganges reaches the great North Indian plain, offering the opportunity for us - and a few thousand others - to paddle in its sacred waters.
And yet, for all this ‘routine’, no visit disappoints; rather the opposite, with each one offering not just much that is memorable and heart-warming, but also something that is new and different - this time, for instance, Pema and especially Mega being willing to reveal much more background about their families and their own early lives in Tibet than ever before.
Mega is a Khampa, by far the largest Tibetan ethnic group, comprising 80% of all Tibetans. Khampas are traditionally fairly warlike and very direct and no nonsense: one evening Simkey, Pema and Mega’s daughter, rang from Canada, and Mega proceeded to have a conversation with his fellow Khampa son-in-law Tsering in which both of them spoke with a machine-gun like intensity, much to Pema’s amusement.
Pema says that Simkey has inherited her father’s Khampa directness: their son, Thinlay, has recently been visiting her, and has been complaining to his mother about the number of house-rules his formidable and beautiful elder sister has made him observe!
Mega’s family came from a very rural area far to the east of Lhasa, well outside the ‘Tibet Autonomous Region’. While staying with him and Pema, I was reading Patrick French’s fascinating book, ‘Tibet, Tibet’, and learnt that many ethnic Tibetans (including the present Dalai Lama) come from outside the autonomous region. One evening I asked Mega how far it had been from his home to the nearest city. He pondered and responded that Chengdu was twelve hours away…by horseback.
The twenty-one Khampa families who dominated Tibet before the Chinese takeover in 1948 owned three-quarters of the country’s land, with each family/clan possessing their own armoury. Mega belonged to one of these families.
Mega is not starry-eyed about Tibet before the Chinese invasion. He says that one of the reasons Tibet is as it is now is because of the way in the past rich Tibetans exploited poor Tibetans. Nor were the Khampas guilt-free: some Khampas disobeyed the Tibetan government in 1948 with calamitous results, while others had actually led the Chinese invaders to Lhasa. However, he is proud of the part Khampas played in the Dalai Lama’s escape and he admits to resenting the way that the present-day Dharamsala government in exile contains comparitively few Khampas, and that there are only a handful of Khampa MPs. He also feels strongly that second-generation Tibetan exiles in the West don’t seem to acknowledge and venerate the great men of the recent past who laid down their lives for their country and their people.
Pema herself is a Kongpo, who comprise only five percent of Tibetans. Kongpos are very different to Khampas, speaking a gentler dialect of Tibetan, and more urban, educated and attractive: Pema seems very proud that the last four Miss Tibets have all been Kongpos!
Pema’s father was a businessman living in the area south of Lhasa, the most fertile and mineral-rich area in Tibet (and the region that now hosts the main Chinese military bases). Her father, to whom she was very close, would take apricots, dried mushrooms, yak and sheep wool, and Tibetan spices and herbs to Burma and India to trade there, returning with Indian silk, cotton and leather shoes. Like Mega, Pema’s family, too, fled the Chinese over the Himalayas in 1959 when Pema was five or six, and settled in Darjeeling.
While she was at College, Pema became an evangelical Christian, and to her family’s horror was often out in the streets with a ‘Youth for Christ’ group. One day she returned home to find plans for a great celebration underway in her home. When she asked what the celebration was about, she was told it was for her wedding to Mega: her parents hoped that a disciplined husband twenty years older than her would ensure she was ‘well controlled!’ The rest, as they say, is history.
It was fascinating to learn all this – and to discover that there are many Khampas among the children who’ve been through the home – and that Khampas are notoriously protective of each other.
Incidentally, Pema’s faith these days has evolved somewhat: she remains a fervent believer, still fairly evangelical in approach, even if she only goes to her church in Dehra Dun occasionally, but now combining that faith with daily yoga, and with great respect for Buddhist traditions and the Dalai Lama. She meditates and prays for an hour every morning, and fasts every Monday, partly as a way of interceding for those she loves.
Over the years, Pema had always felt deeply hurt by the way her family had rejected her because of her faith. However, in the last year, she has decided that she needed - not least for her own well-being and peace of mind - to forgive her dead parents: and she has done so, she says, by an act of will - with very positive results, which have been noticed and commented on by Mega and their children.
It was good, too, to catch up on news of Simkey and Thinlay, and to speak to them both on the telephone. Simkey joined her husband Tsering two years ago in Toronto in Canada, and seems well-settled, both of them enjoying their year old daughter, Tara, and all the challenges of parenthood. Thinlay, meanwhile, is now officially betrothed to Urgen, a cousin of Tsering’s who lives in the USA, and has moved there in the last year to be closer to her. However, Thinlay wants to get better-qualified - and to find a good job (for which he will need a work permit) - before marrying her. Pema herself had been deeply upset when her beloved Thinlay joined his sister in North America, but she and Mega seem gradually to have come to terms with their children being so far away, and talk regularly with them on the phone.
At the moment it is impossible for Pema and Mega to make any plans for the future – in terms of a possible move to North America. Tibetan culture will not countenance parents moving in with a daughter’s family, so they have to wait for Thinlay to decide where he will settle before seeing what options are available for them. Anyway, although Pema thinks on balance she herself would probably choose to move in order to be close to her children, it is far from easy for elderly Tibetans with refugee passports to get permission to emigrate to North America – and she is not convinced that Mega in his mid-70’s would benefit from such an uprooting.
The latter still gets up at 4.30am every morning and is remarkably fit, spending the first half hour of the day doing exercises, but partly in the aftermath of a car crash last year even he has been beginning to feel his age, physically and psychologically.
Pema and Mega have sensibly decided that it is no longer wise to take in any more children into the Home, given their ages and health, and the relative uncertainty about their future. That said, Pema fairly recently made the decision to accept one little boy (aged six), after his parents split up: Tibetan custom is that in such cases sons go with their father, but the boy’s father is a porter in the Himalayas and unable to look after him.
The seventeen children left comprise twelve girls and five boys, including three older girls, who have a kind of ‘big sister’ role in the Home. The oldest girl composed and made a most accomplished official thank you speech to us before the party on our last night. Another, meanwhile, who is half-Indian and half-Tibetan and wants to be an air hostess, is a Vice-Prefect at the Johnson school. Indeed, one of the most touching features of any stay is the chance to observe quite how kind and supportive all the children are of each other.
However, the strongest characters in the Home seem to be a group of younger girls, all between eight and twelve: one girl, who is half-Nepalese, dances superbly, and displays great poise; another who had been selected by Mega to serve our meals throughout, possessor of a beautiful smile and a real presence; two more excellent dancers; a pretty orphan who had been abused whilst working in a Dehra Dun hotel, before being rescued from there by Pema; and finally a girl whose farther had accidentally killed himself with a grenade, who was much more relaxed and at home than during my last visit.
The boys kept more to themselves, a quiet close-knit group. However, it was good to see an intensely shy lad come out of himself on the last night, revealing an impressive dress sense as well as good foot movement on the dance floor. His two brothers are among the nine children who live with their own families but are supported by the Home.
Incidentally, the children’s singing and dancing skills are apparently honed through watching Hindi movies during the weekly 1-5pm Saturday and Sunday sessions in front of Pema and Mega’s television.
Herbertpur itself, situated as it is on a major crossroads, continues to grow – and it remains endlessly fascinating to stand on the Home’s second floor balcony and watch the world go by. Not that everything is always calm and peaceful: indeed, the town has always suffered from communal tensions. Three Sikhs were killed there after Indira Gandhi was assassinated; and it has long been a centre of the extreme Hindu group, the RSS, linked closely to the Janata party which still retains control of Uttarkhand State, of which Herbertpur is a part.
While we were staying with Pema, the District Collector visited the town as a matter of some urgency to try and settle a dispute about a pipeline which runs outside the house, after an effigy of the Chief Minister had been burnt and a mini-riot had taken place. Pema also told us of a recent incident at the school where she had to placate a Muslim deputation after one of her teachers, a Hindu, had apparently hit and bruised a Muslim pupil. And back in December 2007, she had had to postpone a planned visit from my neice after there had been a fight between some Tibetan and Indian youths - after an incident like that, she and Mega and their fellow Tibetans in the area always have to lie low in order to avoid the kind of backlash to which, as refugees, they are so vulnerable.
It requires great tact and restraint on the part of Pema and Mega - still fifty years after arriving in India having to apply annually for an extension of their permit to remain there - to negotiate these dangerous ethnic and communal currents. And yet, like everything they set their hand to, it is something they triumphantly accomplish.
Mark and I finally left on Sunday at midday. As ever, the children had all written and drawn cards of farewell: my favourite was:
This poem is for you
Rose is red
Sky is blue
Oh my sir, I like you
Go to hill
Push me not
Wherever you go
Forget me not
From your lovingly daughter
Jock Dalrymple
November 2009
Saturday, 31 October 2009
MANY THANKS TO NEWBURGH PRIMARY SCHOOL
Many thanks to P4 and all those at Newburgh Primary School in Fife who contributed to the funds raised in October 2009 for the Friends of the Noe Tibetan Children's Home.
Special thanks also to Julia Tod who organised it.
Special thanks also to Julia Tod who organised it.
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
Home visit February 2009
Jock Dalrymple and Mark Hudson (both are trustees) visited Pema and the Home in February 2009. It was a great trip on all fronts. The happy and lively atmosphere is difficult to describe, but you can get a flavour from the photos below. At first, the children were very shy, notably the older ones, but less so by the last day.
Above, Home children are dancing, in a welcome celebration.
There are 17 children living in the Home, the youngest being aged 6. The UK charity also supports a further nine children living outside the Home, including three who have left the Home to study nursing or tailoring.
Quality dancing by the elder girls
In one of the girls' dormitories - Pema in the centre.
Mega, husband of Pema, likes his rum - and so did his guests!
Farewell grouping ...
This (below) is the Home house, on the main road in Herbertpur - with a cycle-rickshaw passer-by.
Thursday, 4 December 2008
Many thanks to SEECAT
We are very grateful to the Justice and Peace Group of SEECAT - South East Edinburgh Churches Acting Together - for a donation in November.
This came after a talk by the founder of the Noe Tibetan Children's Home charity, Jock Dalrymple, in October.
This came after a talk by the founder of the Noe Tibetan Children's Home charity, Jock Dalrymple, in October.
Monday, 3 November 2008
John Peet's visit to the home in March 2008
John writes: I had visited the Noe Tibetan Children’s Home four years ago, so I knew that Pema’s smiling face would be amongst the waiting crowds at Dehradun Railway Station. The train was an hour late but we were soon heading west past the Military Academy along the bumpy road to Herbertpur.
It was great to be back and, whilst Mr Mega and two of the girls prepared supper, Pema and I caught up with news. It was a real tonic to talk with her again – she is so positive about life and has such an impressively deep trust in God. Although Mr Mega had got over his bad car accident, he wasn’t yet driving again. But this hadn’t diminished his culinary skills - a delicious curry was soon served up with an enormous glass of his army rationed rum.
To see photos of my visit, follow this link.
Herbertpur gets cold at night in early March so I was glad of an extra blanket. By the time I arose next morning, Pema was already up and planning the day. As we were breakfasting, the infants were arriving for their school which occupies part of the ground floor of the Children’s home.
We headed to Pema’s school on the bus with the older children. Against the backdrop of Himalayan foothills, the children were lining up for an outdoor assembly under the hot sun. Then, a series of long hessian mats were rolled out across the hard baked earth of the compound. It was exam day. The children involved sat down with a clipboard as desk, one behind the other, cross legged in serried ranks as the exam papers were handed out.
By our standards, the school’s facilities and equipment are basic. [Note that the UK charity supports the Home but not the school.] I was proudly shown the computer room by a couple of the boys. Last time I was invited to take a mathematics class for 15 minutes and on this visit I was relieved to be told we must leave soon for our day trip.
We were off to Hardiwar, a famous Hindu place of pilgrimage on the sacred river Ganges. It was a very hot day and a long journey but well worth the visit. It was wonderful to be given such an opportunity to see more of north India, and particularly generous since it involved the hire of a car and driver.
Sadly, I was only able to spend two nights with Pema and the children, as I was en route to Nepal with a tight itinerary. That evening I was treated to a concert of singing and evocative dancing by the Noe Tibetan children to the accompaniment of a rather croaky cassette player. There’s something quite engaging about the children’s smiles, with every indication that they were happy and thriving under Pema and Mr Mega’s loving care. So it was with a tear in the eye that I said farewell and climbed into the car the next morning, with the kids waving goodbye from their first floor balcony, and Pema’s infectious smile etched in my memory.
** The trustees would like to thank John for his excellent presentation about his visit at the sponsors' meeting in London in September.
It was great to be back and, whilst Mr Mega and two of the girls prepared supper, Pema and I caught up with news. It was a real tonic to talk with her again – she is so positive about life and has such an impressively deep trust in God. Although Mr Mega had got over his bad car accident, he wasn’t yet driving again. But this hadn’t diminished his culinary skills - a delicious curry was soon served up with an enormous glass of his army rationed rum.
To see photos of my visit, follow this link.
Herbertpur gets cold at night in early March so I was glad of an extra blanket. By the time I arose next morning, Pema was already up and planning the day. As we were breakfasting, the infants were arriving for their school which occupies part of the ground floor of the Children’s home.
We headed to Pema’s school on the bus with the older children. Against the backdrop of Himalayan foothills, the children were lining up for an outdoor assembly under the hot sun. Then, a series of long hessian mats were rolled out across the hard baked earth of the compound. It was exam day. The children involved sat down with a clipboard as desk, one behind the other, cross legged in serried ranks as the exam papers were handed out.
By our standards, the school’s facilities and equipment are basic. [Note that the UK charity supports the Home but not the school.] I was proudly shown the computer room by a couple of the boys. Last time I was invited to take a mathematics class for 15 minutes and on this visit I was relieved to be told we must leave soon for our day trip.
We were off to Hardiwar, a famous Hindu place of pilgrimage on the sacred river Ganges. It was a very hot day and a long journey but well worth the visit. It was wonderful to be given such an opportunity to see more of north India, and particularly generous since it involved the hire of a car and driver.
Sadly, I was only able to spend two nights with Pema and the children, as I was en route to Nepal with a tight itinerary. That evening I was treated to a concert of singing and evocative dancing by the Noe Tibetan children to the accompaniment of a rather croaky cassette player. There’s something quite engaging about the children’s smiles, with every indication that they were happy and thriving under Pema and Mr Mega’s loving care. So it was with a tear in the eye that I said farewell and climbed into the car the next morning, with the kids waving goodbye from their first floor balcony, and Pema’s infectious smile etched in my memory.
** The trustees would like to thank John for his excellent presentation about his visit at the sponsors' meeting in London in September.
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