Author: Emma Richardson Major: English Country: India Program: Tibetans in Exile Today (TEXT)
The mattresses at the Drepung Loseling Monastery were made of coconut fiber. I found this out on an early morning walk with Geshe, our faculty leader, as we wandered past the carefully planted coconut grove. Nearly everything thing grown here, he told me, has a specific purpose.
In a trip so far fraught with travel mishaps, the open gates of the monastery provided our first moment of calm and our first glimpse of the real reason we were here. Up to this point, we’d spent countless hours delayed in airports, flown to the other side of the world, losing half our luggage in the process, and spent an hour grounded on a taxiway because a fuel tank had fallen off an ascending plane and onto the runway. Amid a vortex of boarding passes, traffic jams, and other setbacks, spirits were starting to wilt. We had spent the two-week preceding the trip studying Buddhism, oral history techniques, and the political dynamics between Tibet and China. But with wheels down in an unfamiliar environment, that all felt very far away. I was struggling to get my bearings
We stayed in Mundgod for four days. On the third day, we interviewed a retired monk at a senior home. As I observed the interview, an elderly Tibetan woman entered the pavilion where we were shooting, sat next to me and smiled. She sat with us for nearly an hour, occasionally exchanging smiles and consistently counting off mantras on her mala beads. I was perplexed. It was raining, pouring actually, and this tiny elderly lady, no taller than four feet, had come to the pavilion just to sit with us.
I can’t presume to know why she joined us, but I do know the interaction held a certain significance. This lady came and sat with us with apparently no other motive than to share her time with us. She got nothing out of it, apart from caught in the rain, and left as abruptly as she’d come. I had no idea why she was there, but somehow, I knew that her presence was important.
Our final interview was in Dharamsala. It was the third one of the day, and the whole group was beyond tired. We set up the lights and cameras and waited for the arrival of a woman who was formerly tour guide in Tibet after its occupation. Squinting in the afternoon sun, our conversation drifted towards the naps we would take after this, dinner plans, the possibility of walking to a bakery for cake later. When our interviewee arrived, the student interviewing her asked the basic set biographical questions we included at the beginning of every interview and that was all it took. With this small nudge, this woman poured out her life story and everything she’d seen under the occupation of Tibet. From stories public executions to her own interrogation and subsequent escape from Tibet, she voiced her outrage and grief for over two hours. By the end of it, our group was speechless by the courage and resilience of the woman sitting in front of us. I was immediately overwhelmed by the urgency of her story and the significance of simply being given an opportunity to hear it.
At the end of the trip, our videographer asked us for our impressions of the whole experience. At the time, all I could register was exhaustion. We had worked at a breakneck pace. Locations, interviews and subjects were settling into a blur. But now, back home, I am sifting through our time in India with a more critical eye. The vague ideas and impulses I’d felt throughout our trip have come together into a single apex. The purpose of our trip, the significance of the elderly woman at the interview and the unspeakable value of observing our final interview were one and the same: to bear witness.
The trip had many sweaty, insignificant moments. I cannot count the amount of times we looked for our cars in the blazing sun or sat in scorching heat waiting for directions on where to go next. At times like these it was easy to lose sight of why we were there. We were there to bear witness. The atrocities visited on the Tibetan people are going largely unnoticed, or more accurately, ignored. There are thousands of Tibetans living scattered across the world because their home is no longer safe for them, and the global community has colossally failed in acknowledging this.
As a single individual, I do not have the ability to change what is happening in Tibet. However, that does not mean I can ignore it. Bearing witness to the transpiring events in Tibet sends the message to anyone listening that these stories are important and worth hearing.