Thrangu Rinpoche's Aims for SMD Schools
In 1987, Thrangu Rinpoche founded SMD Boarding School near the Great Stupa in the Kathmandu valley of Nepal. SMD Boarding School was opened to serve the needs of children from the Himalayas where there are no schools. In 2002, Rinpoche opened SMD Branch School for Monks to relieve crowding at the main school. The Branch School is at Namo Buddha, on the rim of the Kathmandu valley, about two hours away from the Kathmandu valley.
SMD Schools offer education, housing, medical and dental care to hundreds of mountain kids. Most of the children are from the north of Nepal, but culturally and linguistically they are Tibetan, and their thinking is Buddhist. For centuries, the teachings of the Buddha have flourished without interruption in the Himalayas of Nepal.
Nepal is the poorest, hungriest country in Asia. It has the lowest literacy rates in Asia, and one of the highest child mortality rates in the world. There is little infrastructure, and none in remote mountain villages where people live an ancient lifestyle without roads, electricity, telephones, sanitation, running water, hospitals or schools. Geographically isolated and neglected by Kathmandu, Himalayan people are an ethnic and religious minority in a country where most of the population (+80%) is still excluded from citizenship on the basis of the Hindu caste system.
Exclusion, abject poverty and hunger were the brew that exploded into civil war. From 1996 to 2006 the killing and destruction corroded lives; it left no one untouched. As the fighting spread, SMD was inundated with admission requests. In 2002, we started taking kids on a life and death basis...we asked ourselves, "Can this child survive another year in the mountains?" Geographically isolated, neglected by successive governments, Himalayan people are an ethnic and religious minority in a country where most of the population is excluded on the basis of caste.
Rinpoche’s long-term aim is to preserve the culture, language and the Buddhist way of life of the Himalayas, and to give Himalayan children the tools to build a better future, so they can help their own people when they grow up.
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