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A school comes into being
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It was
in a monsoon evening in August 1989 that my husband and I found shelter once
again in Ngawang Jinpa
Lama's cosy Sherpa kitchen at Phugmoche Monastery. After several days'
trekking in the dripping wet mountain forest we enjoyed sitting by the fire
drinking butter tea. The Lama talked to us about his wish to build a school
here at Phugmoche Gonpa,
on the ancestral ground of his monastery, to teach the tradition of their
forefathers to young Sherpas. For three
or four hundred years Phugmoche has been a centre of the Sherpas'
cultural heritage. At the beginning there was just a hermit's cave, then Ngawang Jinpa's greatuncle built the monastery on a huge rock under the
towering slopes of northern Solu Valley. About 500
years ago the Sherpas, coming from eastern Tibet,
migrated into the valleys south of Mount Everest. Their language, Sherpa, is
a Tibetan dialect. Their religion is an ancient kind of Tibetan Nyingmapa Buddhism. Young Sherpas
who have been educated at a Nepalese school are often alienated from their
cultural background. They do not speak their mother tongue correctly anymore,
so they usually do not want to live in or go back to their villages. Altogether
with the monastery, Ngawang Jinpa
Lama has taken over the obligation of preserving Sherpa culture. He is one of
the main actors of the great spring festival of Dhumje
at Junbesi Temple, in the main village of Solu Valley. He performs the rituals of the summer
festival on the high pastures - but above all it is his duty to accompany the
dying and the souls of the dead as the rituals surrounding death are most
important to all Buddhists. In order
to protect this old tradition from rapid decline, Ngawang
Jinpa Lama wanted to donate part of the Gonpa ground to the Sherpa community, and build a school
on this land. Financial problems had prevented the Lama from carrying out his
purpose until then. Friends
of Nepal Association (Freunde Nepals e. V., Munich, Germany) offered their help, and
only six months later I could hand the first donation over which made it
possible to begin with the construction work. The 8th May 1992 was found to
be the auspicious day to inaugurate the school in a solemn ceremony. On this
occasion the first 15 students were registered. |
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