Rinchen

Here is my friend, Rinchen Tsomo, dressed in traditional clothing from her native region of Dege, Tibet.

Getting ready

I am only a few days away from departing for India a second time.

My first visit was in March of 2004, and it was an exciting three-week trip that included a brief meeting with H.H. the XIVth Dalai Lama, a private audience with H.H. the XVIIth Karmapa, and meditation and instruction in the caves where the Buddhist saint Padmasambhava taught before taking Buddhism to Tibet.


I will once again spend the majority of my time in Upper Dharamsala, the home of the Tibetan Goverment in Exile and a large community of Tibetan expatriates.

One of the people I will visit is my friend Rinchen Tsomo. She escaped from Tibet, which is suffering through its 47th year of brutal Chinese occupation, by crossing the Himalayan mountains on foot with 21 other people. Six of those people died on the trip, and all of them contracted frostbite. Rinchen made it to Nepal, where she found work in a rug shop in Kathmandu that sold rugs from her native region of Dege. Rinchen married a man and had a baby, but soon after that her husband disappeared (Nepal is a dangerous place.)

When I met Rinchen two years ago, she had brought her four year-old daughter Ngawang to Dharamsala to leave her at the Tibetan Children's Village orphanage because Rinchen could no longer afford to take care of her. When I learned that, I knew I had to do something, so I emailed Mrs. Hays from India, and she said we should help Rinchen move to Dharamsala to be safe and to be with her daughter. So that's what we did. For the last two years we have sent Rinchen enough money each month for her to live in Dharamsala, where she can live in safety with her daughter, who is enrolled in the Tibetan Children's School. She is supposed to be doing very well, and I am going to check on my good friends to make sure they have everything they need.

I am looking forward to seeing the beautiful Dheodar Mountains again, eating Tibetan food, and learning more about Tibetan culture and Buddhism ..

Wetlands and Wikis

I just returned this evening from a trip to South Carolina with Mr. Anderson. We were there to meet with teachers and school heads from 16 different schools from all over the eastern half of the U.S. The event was sponsored by NCISR, which Whitfield helped to found back in the 1990's.

The keynote speaker was Alan November, and his remarks have me all fired up about blogging, RSS feeds, publishing student work, wikis, skype and lots of other cool things that my students knew about already, but which are kind of new to me.

South Carolina was my 42nd state. I had visited all the states in the eastern U.S. except SC and now I can focus on travelling west. My only remaining unvisited states are Washignton, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, the Dakotas, Alaska and Hawaii.

We had lots of rain during the conference, which was held at Kiawah Island, a barrier island along the Atlantic shore. While we spent a lot of time in meetings, I did get a chance to walk along the ocean and among the tidal ponds, where I saw Great Egrets, Blue Herons, a few Buffleheads, Sanderlings, Double-Crested Cormorants, Brown Pelicans and several spieces of gulls.

We didn't see any of the alligators rumored to be numerous in the freshwater on the backside of the island.

I would like to return to South Carolina to do some more extensive bird watching with Mrs. Hays some day.

First Post

I have to start somewhere, I suppose. I am estabishing this blog in response to a discussion with Alan November at the NCIS national conference at Kiawah Island, SC on February 3, 2006. I cannot wait to share with my colleagues and my students the ideas generated by discussions at this conference.