During the decade I lived and worked in Nepal, one of the number of different things I did was to attempt to inspire the next generation of youngsters, both Nepalese and others. To that end, I would make presentations at schools about my life, compassion, international understanding, world peace and making life meaningful.
The following is a blog post I created in 2015 as a summation of what I would do in those presentation, notably the important points I would share with them. But I never got around to publishing it, not unlike the dozens of other blog posts I started! Since publishing it now is as good a time as any, here it is! Enjoy!
I wasn’t born into privilege. The circumstances and context of my birth in Nepal meant that considerable odds were stacked against me, that they may even be insurmountable!
While I suffered considerably in my life due to the circumstances and context of my birth, they, however, did not determine my destiny. I was able to achieve my dreams, my dreams did take flight and as a result, I achieved considerable professional and personal success.
I credit that success firstly, to the privilege of education—both formal and informal—and secondly, to humanity!
Education and humanity made all the difference to my life. That discovery, and pursuit of my dreams, has lead me back to Nepal, after spending most of the last 26 years—pretty much all my adult life—abroad.
It’s precisely because of that, because I have suffered and owe my success to humanity, that I have returned to Nepal, to provide that same privilege to the next generation of Nepalese children born into the kind of background and context I was.
This presentation is all about the role humanity played in my dreams taking flight, and why and how I believe humanity will save humanity itself, just as it did me.
I talked about coming from Tangbe, Mustang, and what that meant socially, the living conditions in both the village and the city of Pokhara, and how I had been attending government schools but ended up at St. Xavier’s in Kathmandu because of a teacher at one of those schools.
At St. Xavier’s my North American teachers “provided me with the drive to imagine a world and life different from home.” My dreams to go abroad for tertiary education lead me to the United World College of the Adriatic.
One of a number of things that I recall about my experience at the United World College, one which always gives me a warm feeling in my heart, is the way my friends and their families took care of me and made me feel special during vacations when I couldn’t afford to fly home.
My friends would invite me to stay with their families. Not only that, over winter break, for example, the family would give me Christmas presents just as they did their own children. An Italian family not only bought presents for me, they also bought a gift to give to a very good friend of mine as her birthday present from me!
During those two years, I was on the receiving end of incredible generosities and kindness. Also during those years, I met and befriended fellow students from all over the world shrinking my world!
Living in Italy and traveling a bit in the neighboring countries, I also got a glimpse into the natural beauty of our planet. I got a glimpse into the worlds I had read about in the novels I had devoured throughout my school career in Nepal.
And it was during those years that I came be believe that we humans of different nationalities and different cultures and practicing different religions had more commonalities than differences.
Humanity–I learned, I felt, I discovered–tied us all together.
Following UWCAD, I ended up at Grinnell College, after which I dreamt of going see the world. As luck would have it, I ended up being able to do just that.
For most of the 20 years between 1994 and 2014, I pursued a fantastic international teaching career spanning 10 different countries: from United States in the West to Vietnam in the East; from Norway in the North to Malawi in Southern Africa, and countries like Azerbaijan, Hong Kong and United Kingdom in between…expanding on my network of friends around the world still.
By the time I approached the end of my teaching career, I had traveled to about three dozen countries, and my network of friends spanned the world.
I had seen and done some amazing things in this incredible world of ours and learned a great deal about it: I had trekked to an altitude as high as 5500m in Nepal and scuba dived to a depth of 31m in the Philippines; I had swum with wild dolphins off the cost of Zanzibar; I had skied in the Swiss Alps, snow camped in Norway; hiked in the Dolomites in Italy; had gone hot air ballooning in Australia; and had gone on wild-life safaris in Nepal, in Zambia, and the awesome Ngorongoro Crater and the incomparable Serengeti Plains in Tanzania.
keep myself from losing my way…my way back to the beginning…to where my life’s adventure had begun.
In the mean time, the educational opportunities I had, the professional experience I had, the travel opportunities…what I experienced, what I did, what I saw… what I had been given, and rewarded with, by people I had studied, taught, worked and travelled with…all those privileges I had had…they had all been beyond the wildest imagination of the 1981, fifth grade school-kid in Kathmandu, Nepal, dreaming of going abroad for studies and making something of himself!
Not surprisingly, therefore, even as I was doing everything I felt I needed to, to maintain my connection to where I came from, those experiences would transform me into a person I hadn’t imagined then.
One of the important transformations was that of thinking of myself as a human being FIRST, and then everything else… all aspects of my identity (ethnicity, nationality etc.) coming next!
Countries and nationalities stopped meaning much especially since I had friends spanning the world. Countries represented more faces, people and humanity than political and geographical entities.
The other result of having the privilege of getting formal education in 5 different countries, working in 10 countries spanning 5 continents, and traveling to another 30 or so…the other result of those experiences was drawing certain conclusions about life and the world we live in.
Here’s one of the first ones:
At the core of that is the confirmation I felt I got for my belief in compassion, a Buddhist belief.
However, having been born in a Hindu Kingdom [at the time], and grown up attending a Jesuit school in Nepal, having gotten a high school diploma in Italy, a Catholic country, and worked in two Islamic countries etc.–I have also realized the following about beliefs:
One could make ones life meaningful by living according to a certain set of beliefs, BUT not insist or require or demand that others ALSO believe them and live by them!
Having been born into a low economic background in Nepal and everything else that followed, the following is abundantly clear to me now:
And those core values are none other than kindness, generosity and compassion, in other words humanity, that which I came across all through my life, that which I was a beneficiary of pretty much all my life.
What I also came to realize, having experienced poverty and having seen this all over the world, everywhere, is this:
I encountered this porter on a trek to my village along part of the Annapurna Circuit, way back in the Spring of 2000. The man’s load was so heavy that he took maybe a step every two seconds. But because he was so poor and was paid so little, he carried his own food and cooking utensils to save as much as he could.
The poorest and some of the hardest working people on this planet have the hardest time even putting a meal–a decent single meal–on the table for themselves and their children.
And yet, these very people, the weakest and the most vulnerable–the poor, the marginalized and their children–are often treated the worst.
I, however, have believed the following for a long time:
Some of the weakest and the most vulnerable in Nepal are the children of poor families, children of Dalits, the untouchables, children of marginalized groups such as Tamangs and Tharus, especially girls!
So, in March 2013, I had finally decided to return home for good to help vulnerable Nepalese children, children from from low socioeconomic backgrounds.
Except…I would take minor a detour.
I went on to describe my ordeal in Qatar and how once again humanity came to my rescue. I also went into the details of the experience inside the jail.
The 20-month experience in Qatar in general, and the 12 days in jail in particular, was yet another lesson in pain, suffering and redemption by humanity!
What I experienced during those days in jail, you will most likely not be able to relate nor understand. I don’t mean that you aren’t intelligent enough nor am I trying to be patronizing. As a matter of fact, I hope you never in your life get to a point where you are able to relate to, or understand, experiences such as that. If you do, then that will unfortunately mean that you have suffered too!
Having already reached bottom during my time at Qatar Academy—emotionally and psychologically—long before the incarceration, when the ordeal began the afternoon of May 1, with the huge metal door to my private cell closing with a loud bang and shutting me inside the cold, wet room, I had the feeling that the bottom had been pulled from under me—so to speak.
But there were others in jail, as well as outside, in Qatar, and elsewhere, who had lost everything, and as a result lived and continued to live with such despair…EVERY SINGLE DAY.
And what’s more, in Nepal and many other countries I have lived and traveled to, there are hundreds of thousands who live in despair every single day. In Nepal they are families of migrant laborers, poor families and their children, families and their children belonging to the low castes etc.
That brings me to why I do what I do, why I do the kind of work I do in Nepal….
I do them for two reasons:
Firstly, to ensure that those children realize their dreams and have, if even on a small scale, the kind of incredible life I have had—namely, to see and learn about this marvelous world we live in and the people we share it with.
Secondly, and more importantly, to ensure that they do not experience the suffering, the pain and the despair that I have experienced, which they invariably will– especially little girls and Dalit children–if no one does anything about their situation.
I believe in international understanding, a phrase and a concept I was introduced to when I was a student at the United World College of Adriatic.
International understanding to me is nothing other than seeing the world through others’ eyes, empathizing with others, being kind, being generous, being benevolent, being compassionate…in other words displaying humanity!
What’s more, I believe our feelings for fellow human beings, our compassion and empathy for fellow human beings, and our ability to see ourselves in the shoes of fellow human beings, will contribute to making the world a better place, a more peaceful place, a goal of United World College education.
Having been on the receiving end of the incredible degree of humanity from people everywhere…from teachers from when I was a young student at Bal Jyoti School in Pokhara all the way to Grinnell College in the US, from others in Nepal and abroad when I was a student as well as when I was a teacher, and when I was jailed, from having had the opportunity to transform my life into something that was way beyond the wildest imagination of the young Dorje of Nepal, I believe humanity is the only thing that will save humanity itself.
That is yet another reason why I do what I do.
And you, all of you gathered here today, you who have opportunities that a large percentage of children around the world don’t and won’t have…the network of friends you have established and will continue to expand on in the years to come… will give you a power that most people don’t and won’t have.
How you use that will be entirely up to you.
My hope is that you will use it to make your life meaningful…just as I have tried and continue to try to do.
