Documenting Another Culture's Memories: Stories from Service Learning Abroad #hogsabroad

A group of fifteen of us crammed into a corner of the Ama Guesthouse dining hall in Majnu-ka-tilla, New Delhi.  I marveled at the old woman sitting across from me.  Her face was roughly hewn by time, but it was just a mask; under the tired mask were the red-hot passion and vitality of former Tibetan nobility.  The story proceeding from this woman’s mouth was the stuff of movies—Chinese soldiers crawling over the Tibetan countryside, family farm burning to the ground, flight into exile on horseback, and the booming of cannons and tank munitions into the empty night around her. 

This Tibetan’s face and story belonged in a National Geographic feature.  But here she was in silent exile, doing all she could to tell us about her community’s struggle…

As far as study abroad programs go, the TEXT Program is unique. 

Tibetans in Exile Today: India is an oral history project designed to record the stories of Tibetans currently living in refugee settlements in India.  Our group focused on Tibetans who left their country in 1959 for exile, but still have rich memories of traditional Tibetan culture.

Abroad, we Razorbacks experienced India through the lenses of humanitarians, rather than those of a student, and our most precious lessons were learned in the service of an oppressed people, rather than in the classroom.

Lessons on compassion, geopolitics, cultural preservation, and the human condition were woven and packaged together as we met one fascinating person after another.  (I did not know it at the time, but this trip was the foundation for my honors thesis, “Tibet & China: Autonomy, Independence, and Tibetan-Chinese Relations.”) We recorded the stories of these amazing people, in hope that the future will not be deaf and blind to the Tibetan story.

In the exiled Tibetan communities we experienced a people of hope in a place where hopelessness would have made more sense.  These people and their hope impacted my team and me profoundly; their survival in exile in the face of unmoving obstacles is inspiring.  There was no better way to love these people than to listen to their stories, and there was no better way to learn about myself than to step with compassion into their lives.  

The Tibetans in Exile Today program is a life-changing educational experience.  TEXT deeply impacts the worldviews of participating university students, and it deeply impacts the Tibetan communities that it exists to serve.

--Bobby Howard, Tibetans in Exile Today: India Summer 2011 Participant