In May, our Principal Khenpo Chonyi Rangdrol and I visited Lhundup Sherpa, one of our scholarship students in Vancouver, British Columbia. Lhundup has just completed two years at Mulgrave School winning the International Baccalaureate diploma. He has been offered a partial scholarship at Simon Fraser University but  is planning to work while he goes to university, but he will still need extra help.

Lhundup is an extremely hard worker. I know this from my own experience...he worked as my assistant for a year and a half before he went off to take up the scholarship at Mulgrave. Once there, Lhundup astonished the Mulgrave community with energy and dedication. He won the Mulgrave Effort Award two years running. 

Lhundup is a walking example of the SMD spirit; he is always helping others. On his own time, got the girls' basketball team going (coaching early mornings for two years) so they won the regional championship just before he left Nepal. And during the time he worked as my assistant, he supported his family out of the small stipend we pay students on their Gap years. Another one of the Gap year kids told us about it. We senior administrators were so moved by his selflessness and impressed by his work that we offered him full adult pay. What did he do with it? He used most of it to help his family and to help two kids from his village go to school. 

During that village visit, he found a homeless family with four kids. None of the kids were going to school. The mum and dad were sharecropping...and they couldn't feed or clothe their kids. Lhundup arranged to have them live in his family's house, which had been left empty after his dad's accident. The last thing Lhundup did before leaving Nepal was to buy a wheelchair for his dad. 

Lhundup has written his own appeal, which I've included at the bottom of this email. Lhundup Sherpa is an SMDer we are all very proud of. If anyone is worthy of help, this young man is. Please share this with anyone you think may be interested in helping. 

Thank-you for reading this.

Shirley Blair

 

My name is Lundup Sherpa. As a young, fortunate student from the Himalayas who received a scholarship to attend Mulgrave School in West Vancouver, I am reaching out to you to help me to continue my education here in Canada. I finished class 10 and left Shree Mangal Dvip School (a non-profit school for the education for Himalayan children in Kathmandu, Nepal) on a two-year scholarship (grades 11 and 12) at Mulgrave School. SMD School was established in 1987 by the Tibetan Buddhist monk, Thrangu Rinpoche to benefit the children from the Himalayan regions, who desperately lack any education. The school catchment area is the Nepal side of the Himalayan massif, from villages mostly around the Himalayan region. Most of our villages lie above 10,000 feet and are extremely remote. Life is pre-industrial. We have no electricity, running water, sanitation, health care, school or money. Most villagers are illiterate.

The population of Nepal consists of four major castes with sixty-one sub-castes and ethnic groups who speak forty different languages. I belong to the Sherpa ethnic group. The Sherpas came to Nepal from Tibet about two hundred years ago. The Sherpas are Mongolian in origin, speak a dialect of Tibetan, live an ancient nomadic lifestyle and are Buddhist. We are ethnically and linguistically distinct from mainstream society in Nepal and unlike the Hindu mainstream, Buddhists do not subscribe to the notion of caste.

I was born in a remote area of the northern Himalayan region of Nepal, bordering Tibet. I have two sisters, a brother, my father and mother. It takes eight hours by bus and a further 6 hours by foot to reach my village from Kathmandu. I am the youngest of my family and am very fortunate to have had the opportunity to get a modern education. I am the only literate member in my family.

My family once was nomadic but unfortunately my father had a serious accident and he became paralyzed after falling from a tree. Consequently, we had to sell all our yaks and settle in a farm in the village. My elder sister is a Buddhist nun and has lived most of her life in a monastery. My younger sister helps my mother in the fields, and my brother has gone to work in Israel to support my family as my father cannot work at all. My father needs frequent medical attention, so he and my mother later moved to Kathmandu.

When I was six years old, my uncle took me to SMD School in Kathmandu in order for me to get an education. The school provided me everything for eleven years and has become my second home. It supplies all the basic needs to all the 600 children. I have been influenced by the generosity shown by our school founder. This school does not just help its students; it also helps the communities they come from, as the students return to their villages to share what they have learned. Having been born into a family that lives from hand-to-mouth, I have been extremely fortunate to receive a scholarship to further my education in Canada.

Arriving in a different world ( Canada) and experiencing a very different culture has been one of the greatest challenges of my life. I have found this to be very enriching experience, and have learned many things from Canadians, and from the people, culture and environment in Vancouver. The educational facilities in Canada are amazing.

I have been staying with a host family in North Vancouver while I have been attending Mulgrave School, and they have been supporting every aspect of my life here. During my time at Mulgrave School I faced difficulties trying to catch up with the new system of teaching in Canada, which was very different from the way I am used to in Nepal. There were moments where I sat and cried alone. However I encouraged myself, and studied day and night to keep up and achieve good grades. Receiving this amazing education will not only benefit me - it will help of the people of my village and others in the Himalayas. Keeping this in mind, and with help from my teachers, classmates and my host family, I completed my High School education. I worked as hard as I could. This was recognized when I was awared the Mulgrave Effort Award in Grades 11 and 12. I graduated from Mulgrave School on June 5, 2009 having completed two years of the International Baccalaureate program.

While Mulgrave School and my host family have been very supportive, I am very concerned about what will happen next. I applied to a number of universities in Canada and the U.S. and was accepted at several; however I did not receive sufficient financial support to permit me to accept. I must have full financial support in order to continue with my post-secondary education. I have no one in Canada except my host family. My parents back in Nepal can not support me as they themselves are struggling to survive in the village. Moreover, they are expecting financial support from me even though I am living in a very critical situation. My dad has gotten diabetes recently and is having a hard time getting proper treatment.

My goal is to continue my education in Canada. I have been accepted at Simon Fraser University with a partial scholarship. My host family has done the best they can to support my further education, and are helping me to visit my parents once a year back in Nepal. I am really thankful to them.. I still need approximately $6000 to continue my studies. If I fail to reach this financial goal, then I am pretty much done with my golden opportunity that I worked so hard for day and night the past two years.

The education system in Nepal is very crude and disorganized. It is highly politicized, and is extremely challenging for low caste people like Sherpas. If I do have the privilege of studying in Canada, I plan to return to Kathmandu to become the Director of SMD School, taking over from our dear Director. I intend to follow her excellent lead in fulfilling the wishes of our teacher, Thrangu Rinpoche. I believe that completing my education at SFU would effectively prepare me for this role. The most important task is to pass along my Western knowledge to the disadvantaged children of the Himalayas and to help them achieve their goals. Most of all, I really want to be able to give back to the Himalayan children all that I have received here in Canada.

I believe that my personal background, my desperate need and my life experience in the high Himalayas and in Canada have prepared me well for success at SFU, and for my intended profession – Director of Shree Mangal Dvip School in Kathmandu. I would be so glad and appreciative to get any support at all. A little help and some contributions will definitely bring change into my life.

Please contact my host father, Chuck Brook, at cbrook@brookdev.com, if you are interested in helping me to achieve my dreams.

To send funds through any of SMD School’s non-profits in Canada, the US or Europe, please contact the Director of SMD Shirley Blair: himalayanchildren@gmail.com

Thank you in advance for your understanding and support.

Lundup Sherpa