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Ever since I arrived at the monastery, now over a month ago, my most consistent job has been to help Khenpo Sonam Dhondup improve his English conversational ability. Khenpo Dhondup is the Principle of the school and the head of the monastery administrative committee, in effect he is the person who is in charge of the monastery on a daily basis. Not being a trained teacher I wasn't sure how I was going to go about this teaching, however, being someone who loves a good conversation, I knew I would be able to carry off the conversation part of the job. As it has turned out, lucky me, I haven't needed any teaching skills for this job, Khenpo has a huge vocabulary, notebook after notebook filled with words he knows, he has a reasonable command of English sentence construction and loves to converse. As a result, all I have really had to do is engage him in conversation, the reverse is just as often true, he is anxious to engage me in conversation, spell and define a few words for him, correct some pronunciation and tell him to speak more slowly so that he has the time to pronounce each word clearly. This last challenge I have almost given up on. And the best part of all, being an administrator, which by definition means always being sought out to answer some question, he was anxious to work on his English someplace where he wouldn't be constantly interrupted. During our first conversation we decided that we would work on conversation while taking walks, at least every other time we met. This worked well for me as well, since one of my goals in traveling was to carve out more time for walking/exercise. As things have turned out, this plan has worked out almost perfectly, when we are both here at the monastery, which is most of the time, we have walked every other day and sometimes more often.
Since the monastery, which you can tell from some of the pictures I have posted, is perched on the side of a very steep hill there is no choice of flat. The only choice for our walks is up first or down first. Especially initially I usually opted for up first, worried that I would not have enough energy for an up last toward the end of the walk. On our first walk I told Khenpo, which means senior teacher, that as part of my trip I had hoped to get in a little better shape and loose some weight, for me these are actually perennial goals. He took this as a challenge and saw to it that our walks got me sweating and were long enough to make a difference. We were always out for between two and three hours, though some of this time was spent drinking tea with some of the many people he knows along the course of our walks. Every so often he also threw in what I found to be really difficult walks to places we didn't usually go. So far I haven't collapsed on any of these walks, though a couple of times I thought I was close. And the good news is that Khenpo is an excellent coach, at this point I can handle our standard walks easily, something that was not true when we started and I have lost a good amount of weight. I cant tell how much, no scale, but it is several notches on my belt, always a good sign.
As I mentioned earlier Khenpo seems to know people all over this hill and so our walks are often interrupted by stopping to visit with some local farmers over a cup of tea, which has really been a great introduction to the local culture. The photos that accompany this post has views of some of the many people we have stopped to visit and some of the sights along our walks. One of the most amazing sights along our walks are what local people call the "snow mountains" the high Himalayas. Unfortunately, the pictures do not show them well, as on the clearest days I managed to forget my camera, but they are amazing and fill the entire northern skyline, 180 degrees at some outlooks. It is impossible to find anyone around here that knows which mountain is which but suffice it to say, what we are seeing are some of the highest mountains in the world, and perhaps even the highest mountain in the world, Chomalungma, known in the West as Everest.
At first I was somewhat concerned that we would run out of topics to talk about, but I shouldn't have worried, we both love conversation and, it turns out, we both are fascinated by the cultures and systems around us. He has explained a great deal to me about how a monastery runs, about the many cultures that intersect at a place like a monastery and about the education of monks, which as head of the monastery is his main job. I have also learned a great deal about the culture and economy of the Ladakh area of India, which is where he and the vast majority of the monks at this monastery are from. Ladakh is in the high mountains of north-western India, it's capitol Leh, in the Indus River valley, is located at over 10,000 feet altitude, and most of the area is uphill from there. It is a traditionally Buddhist part of India, with ancient trade routes into western Tibet, that is populated by an industrious people who somehow earn a comfortable, self sufficient living from Ladakh's alpine geography. Needless to say, Khenpo's stories about growing up in Ladakh have made me even more interested in visiting, and now I have many invitations. So, it is definitely on the list for my next trip.
It is hard for me to look at my time here at the monastery, and especially my time with Khenpo, as a job teaching English. I think it could be better described as a mutual learning experience, and, lets not forget, a very pleasant way to get in shape and loose some weight.
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