Fall 2006

Tashi delek!

After years of discouraging reports, here’s some good news. We are an extended ceasefire and Nepal has returned to parliamentary democracy. The rebels are going back into mainstream politics, they will stand for elections and some will once again have seats in parliament. If the ceasefire can stay stitched together, we’ll have UN supervision as both armies disarm. The mood of the nation is profoundly different…the climate of fear disappeared overnight. Tourists are beginning to trickle back in, and there is a possibility of real change.

If all goes well, Nepal will have representation by population…grassroots democracy, where the majority (+80%) who have been excluded by caste, ethnic and linguistic discrimination will be full citizens: they will be able to vote, open bank accounts, own property, get drivers’ licenses and passports and have recourse to justice. Eventually, children will be able to study in their own languages.

More good news: the 2006 batch of Class 10 students graduated, all passed and all stood in the First Division. This is the fourth year in a row that SMD has had a 100% pass rate and the first time that everyone got First Division marks. (To compare: only 8% of public school candidates managed to pass. More than 200,000 students wrote the exams.)

More good news: SMD is one of the top schools in Nepal. Ten have won placements at some of the finest schools in the world (the United World Colleges system has given four). Others include: St. Julian’s, a British school in Portugal, Mulgrave (Vancouver) Appleby College (Oakville) Bishop Strachan (Toronto) and West Island College (Calgary). Our first two graduates from the United World Colleges are on full scholarship in first and second year bachelor’s studies in the US. All of them are doing well academically, and all are earning plaudits for the quality of their being…an outcome of their training in Buddhism.

We’ve had a lot of visitors in the last year. Rinpoche himself was at SMD in the spring, teaching western students in SMD’s shrine hall, at another time in the spring, Rinpoche taught all his monks and nuns, again in the main shrine hall. At the end of the teaching, two to three thousand people came to receive his blessing.

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