Dark before dawn, sound of feet running outside. Some students are already in the kitchen, making flatbread for breakfast. Others gather for physical training, preparing for ice hockey season. Some are sleeping; there is a cold going around, and many of them have woken up at midnight or 2 am to water the ice, carrying buckets to the rink they are working to create. Soon the morning dark will be full of the sound of skates on ice.
First light, we come together for hot water and thuksing, a thin barley soup with peas, black pepper, and dried cheese. Students gather sleepily in circles to discuss what they’ve been assigned, some topic from classes or a guest speaker the day before. Finally the kitchen crew emerges with breakfast; they run a firm, direct line from kitchen to serving place, the giant pots at the edge of their strength to carry.
We teach classes in the morning, English grammar and conversation, free to do it as we like. We spend free time making games, finding ways to distinguish future and past and present continuous for students whose mother tongue is divided by ways of knowing rather than categories of time. It’s good to play, and to sing with them. We teach them the Beatles’ Blackbird, then work together to translate it into Ladakhi.
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Renovation of the upper building is underway, and Pradhip, the young man from HIAL managing the job, asks if I can weave willow. He had a vision of woven lampshades, but he couldn’t figure it out with the students. I tell him I’ll try, spend a sunny afternoon hammering willow pegs into frozen earth to make a prototype. It comes out all right, and I learn things. It looks crazy, what I’m doing, and everyone is curious. The next one is beautiful; so many students want to come help. They love playing with the willow, working in pairs to bend it into shape.
Evening, just past dark– there is singing in the dining hall, and I cross the threshold from the night outside to the bright warmth within. Ache Thukje is there with the students, teaching a new song. Her sightless eyes turn upwards, and slightly away; when she is singing it always seems to me that she is listening to something just beyond the reach of the rest of our ears. Her long, angular hands beat a complex rhythm on the floor. As always with new songs I can understand only the rough shape at first: the refrain summons the sun, the morning star. Dechen Angmo, a quiet, graceful Changthangma writes the words in Bodyik and I read next to her, almost keeping up. Then it is time for play rehearsal; she lets me borrow her notebook and I do my best to copy out the lyrics. It is a wedding song. But soon the rehearsal begins and I cannot look away.
Their drama is an enactment of the watches of the Ladakhi agricultural season, each work sung into life with its proper song. The songs are familiar but I have never heard them so full and strong, lifted up by many young voices all together. I think how it would be if they were all in Tar this year for the plowing or the harvest, what joy that would bring to any of their villages. I wonder if their parents saw the seasons cared for in this way, or their grandparents. We find Ache Thukje after and she is glad to meet us, touching our faces, taking our hands and holding them tightly. She tells us this is only the students’ second rehearsal; we thought they must have been practicing for a month.
Ka Sonam Wangchuk comes after dinner to give the evening talk. He has just returned from Afghanistan; he speaks in clear, slow, precise English, while Stanzin Norbu writes difficult words and translates them on a board over to the side. The students have laid out a rug for him and he sits cross-legged on the floor with the rest of us, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped or gesticulating as he talks. I feel amazed by all the worlds through which he moves, and at the same time his humility and grace. He is serious and stern with the students, chiding them for asking the same question twice, not listening to each other. He tells them listening is the most important thing they can learn. But also he is gentle, teasing, full of laughter, especially afterwards as he switches back to Ladakhi and students come up individually to talk with him. He greets us kindly, as old friends. Later he meets with all the young staff, stays talking with them until quite late. SECMOL was his first great work, and he is as committed to it now as ever, I think.
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The next night the students’ director Ka Tsetan Angchuk comes for their rehearsal. Becky tells me later he has been a primary school teacher and teacher trainer in the government schools for more than forty years, but I don’t know this yet– I only know that he is brilliant, and fills the room with his voice. He is a strong director, ordering the students, encouraging them, pushing them to do better, do their best. “Who has been on a plowing field? How is it? How is it? Quickly now! Who has cedar? Who has chang? Who’s carrying seeds? Don’t talk about it, just find your roles!”
Loldan, a tall thin young man from Shara, says he can give the ploughman’s song. His voice is beautiful, and tenuous at first. Ka Angchuk’s voice breaks in, loud, carrying, weaving in and out of the other songs. He calls the praise of the dzo, calls the turns, raises his pitch to a shriek to urge the animals on. Orignially he is from Snyemo, and gives the tongskat like a Shampa, like our friends in Tar.
It is beautiful, what they are doing.
May it be alive, I find myself thinking. May it not become an enactment of a world that has passed.
At ten to seven they scatter and come back for dinner wearing traditional dress. It is Monday, someone tells me: Ladaksi karji, Ladaksi kos, Ladaksi skat. Ladakhi food, dress, language. Usually at dinner a series of activities carefully chosen for English language learning takes place: they listen to the Ladakhi news and report on it in English; students prepare talks and ask questions; they offer public apologies and thanks. On Mondays though, everything happens in Ladakhi. They are beautiful in their woolen robes, moving with a sort of fledgling dignity. The boys help each other tie their skyeraks properly around the entryway of the hall, rushing to be on time.
Days pass quickly. Dadul graciously brings 50 kilos of yak meat from Changthang, and we spend many evenings at Becky’s slicing frozen meat paper-thin for drying, and hang it in a screen cabinet on the roof. The meat feels like medicine; we are amazed with gratitude for this abundance, and for the old wise methods of preserving meat in the cold desert.
We get to share precious times with old friends: Padma Othsal was a college student when we were first here, and now is SECMOL’s director. He’s a beautiful singer and guitar player, and impromptu moments of making music together with him feel like treasures. We knew Stanzin Norbu and Konchok from their college student days as well, and TT was a foundation student when we first arrived. He remembers our first attempts to learn Ladakhi language. Now he is a fellow, and an excellent skater; the younger students look on him with some awe. I ask TT offhand about jabro, a traditional form of song and dance from Changthang, and he immediately leaps into its complex pattern of jumps, turns, and claps.
We were able to visit Kargyam — the semi-nomadic village TT and Padma Otsal are both from — back in the winter of 2016, far out in the high eastern region of Ladakh. I feel honored and amazed to know these young men, and to touch the world from which they come.
(Left: a video Padma Othsal took last summer of Kopong players at the Nomadic Festival in his village, Kargyam)
In the last days before SECMOL breaks for Losar, forty students from private schools in Leh arrive for a youth camp. “Not the private school students! We don’t want them!” Ache Thukje is adamant; they have been difficult to host in the past: lazy, proud, disrespectful. “This is how we infiltrate the education system,” Sonam Wangchuk says. “I want every private school student in Leh to come to SECMOL at least once. They are the ones who will be holding power in the future.”
But everyone in this group has been selected by their teachers or self-selected for leadership, and they are happy to come and be present; they integrate well into the life and rhythms of SECMOL, following our students’ lead and instruction. Hands shoot up into the air to volunteer for 4 am breakfast duty; they clean canals and the cowshed during work hours. After three days, they don’t want to leave. I come out of the dining hall to find Padma Othsal surrounded by students, begging to be allowed to stay. “Please let us stay! Please! Do you have a bone in your heart?”
I think about organizations I have worked with in the US, how impossible it would be to change the parameters of something of this scale at the last minute. It seems, for some time, to be an impasse. “I will discuss it with the other staff,” he tells them finally, and he does– in the end everything shifts around by a day or two, and the camp continues.
Galdan Namchot is a festival honoring Lama Je Tsongkapa, a great teacher and reformer of the 14th century. It also marks the beginning of Losar observations in many villages, and is the SECMOL community’s opportunity to celebrate Losar together. In the evening they light butter lamps throughout the campus, and arrange the dining hall in finery to welcome guests. Stanzin Norbu dresses up as a fortune teller and reads the stars and natures of everyone in the room. After food, long sitting, and uproarious laughter, the students go outside to light a willow wood bonfire on the dry garden fields.
For some time all of them dance in a circle around the fire, varying between traditional Ladakhi song and dance and modern pop. As the fire dies down most of them go back inside for warmth, light, speakers, and a full-on Hindi dance party. I stay with the fire for a long time into the night, until the last coals are ready to stir out. I have missed the fire, these weeks. There are a thousand, thousand stars.
Caitlin and Jason,
What a deeply felt (and well communicated) account! I love your writing. You take me there with you. Is anyone living in your Maine home during your absence? Two years is a long time but you seem to fit right in as local people. Thank you for taking the time to record your thoughts, feelings, sights, impressions, and your lives.
Love to you both,
Cloe
Hi Cloe! Thank you so much for reading! It’s great to hear from you. Thanks for your appreciation!
There is a young couple living in our home for the winter, and because of the efforts of dear friends, we have support lined up to do vacation rentals with our house and a little cabin we built nearby, for the summer. So we are figuring it out, one step at a time.