Dear Praying Friends,

We are now near the end of our semester so, as with all schools, the marking and other work is piling up. Our school activity week found me in Dharamsala with 11th-graders and I add here some of my thoughts and observations.

Activity week in Dharamsala was okay, but not much enjoyed by me. The place itself is filthy (not only Tibetans live there; it is very much Indian as well—not to say one or the other is responsible for the filth—it seems it is just the way of India or underdevelopment and corruption). Dharamsala has an "industry" of tourism, much of which is the unsavory drug scene or wandering hapless souls abandoning civility in the illusion that that will put them in touch with something spiritual, and the propaganda machine of Tibetan politics and Buddhist spirituality is ubiquitous. This makes it difficult to find the "real" in any of it. The bus journey went well, but nothing can make 20 hours on a bus on Indian roads with Indian roadside facilities a pleasure trip. The audience with the Dalai Lama was uneventful; 40 minutes with a celebrity and a photo shoot. Interesting, but not profound.

We visited the government-in-exile offices, particularly Education and later Information. It is an amazing infrastructure. I did, however, find it difficult to sort through what is propaganda and PR and what is the actual running and agenda. Still, even the most skeptical has to acknowledge the feat of organizing in exile and of educating thousands and thousands of Tibetan children as well as providing education—vocational, cultural, and craft education—for Tibetans who then return to Tibet!

I found the spiritual atmosphere of Dharamsala dark and oppressive; in fact, quite uncomfortable. Perhaps the greatest privilege of all was that two of my colleagues and fellow chaperones from the school here are Tibetan! A married couple, both of them escaped Tibet as young children in the early sixties, both have been educated in Tibetan schools in Mussoorie and Dharamsala, and both know many of the government people in Dharamsala because they all grew up together in the boarding schools and Tibetan children’s villages. Their explanations of things, their first-hand descriptions of escape and of Dharamsala in the sixties, and the fact that any walk with them in the bazaar meant continually running into people they knew—people with amazing lives and stories; humble people who have suffered quietly—all these things made it a joy to be with them. It was a privilege, too, to have tea in people’s homes from a small one-room home (with one whole wall devoted to pictures of the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama, idols of the Buddha, offerings, incense, the seven bowls of water, and Thankas—remarkable and interesting intellectually, but still I felt a deep spiritual sadness that I could not address even to myself) to a rather more grand home of an member of parliament of the Tibetan government in exile.

Back in Mussoorie now, we have just celebrated the inception of the new state Mussoorie is now part of, Uttaranchal, with its capital provisionally in Dehra Dun. We can see great changes ahead, not all of them necessarily good for us here. Still, it has been a long dream of the Kumaoni and Garhwali people to have their own state so they can develop not in competition with Lucknow and the plains people’s control of the Uttar Pradesh government.

Apart from that, it is only three weeks now from the end of semester and there is endless marking for me to catch up on. So I close now with good wishes and prayers that God continues to bless your work there,

Kathy Hoffmann

The 2001 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 146

PS. The papers here are saying now that the United States, which has been high and mighty and superior in attitude to the way elections and democracy ought to be organized and run, is now having some of the problems of developing countries’ balloting processes. One article even suggests (tongue in cheek, I think) that perhaps India ought to send its Election Commissioner, Mr. Gill, to help sort things out in Florida!