Hello,
My name is Tsewang Chuskit, and I am a graduate of Siddhartha School, the school you help support. Unexpectedly to me, I am writing from New York, where I am now a senior in high school. On this “Thanksgiving” day, I want to thank you for all that you have done to help Siddhartha School become such a good school and to share with you how much the school means to me and my family.
My mother knows best what a gift Siddhartha School has been for us. She wanted me to have a different life from hers. She quit school very young and started working as a servant. She and my grandparents thought two rupees a month was worth more than an education. By age eighteen she regretted the choice, but by then it was too late. My brother and I attended public school in our village where the school’s condition and the quality of our teachers was hopeless. It was typical to arrive and find no teachers there. My mother wanted better for me, and I want to thank her for giving me life and for being bold enough to want more for me, even if it meant separating us.
When I was eight, she took me to Stok, a village six hours away, because she’d heard of a good school started by a Buddhist monk. She was told he was generous and willing to help needy people. Khen Rinpoche took me into his school, Siddhartha. I am grateful to him for all that he has done to start the school and for accepting so many children like me who couldn’t afford private school. He employs great teachers at the school, and I want to thank each of them as well.
When I graduated from Siddhartha, at the end of 10th grade, and got accepted on scholarship to continue my studies at the Rockland Country Day School in New York, I was excited and nervous. No girl from the Chang Tang had ever left to finish high school in the USA. My teachers had prepared me to the very best of their ability, spending so much time with me, to help me be the very best student I could be. I want to make them proud.
Now I am a senior and on the honor roll. I am applying to colleges in the US and India. I am an “ANNpower” fellow and spent last summer giving presentations in my part of Ladakh to village girls and their mothers on health education and leadership empowerment with Stanzin Angmo, my classmate at Siddhartha now in her senior year at North Yarmouth Academy in Maine. Returning to Ladakh to help was wonderful, and I am very excited by the project work I am doing there to help girls.
Nothing like this would have been possible for me today without your support of and friendship to Siddhartha School. Everyday, I remember your kind support. It inspires me to help others and pursue a career to be helpful. I want to be a doctor, perhaps starting a women’s health clinic in the remote area of the Chang Tang from where I come. A clinic in the Chang Tang would be very helpful to girls there, who know very little about their bodies and have no plans beyond getting married often much younger than is good for them.
Forgive me for not listing each and every one of your names,as I recall the kindness of everyone who has helped to make my life so different, so much bigger. It is you, my mother, each of my teachers, and Khen Rinpoche whom I will thank when I have dinner tonight with my American friends and family and dream of returning back home to help my own.
With love and appreciation,
Tsewang Chuskit
