TRAS - Spiti Valley, India

Spiti Valley is a remote elevated valley, surrounded on all sides by the Himalayan Mountains. It lies along India's northern border with Tibet in the state of Himachal Pradesh and is known for its harsh winters, when temperatures remain at -35C for six to seven months of the year. Spiti has a population of approximately 10,000. Dried yak dung remains the main source of fuel for cooking and for heating the mud houses.

Spiti people are Indian by birth and nationality, but their language is a dialect of Tibetan and their culture a far flung outpost of the peaceful Buddhist culture that has suffered such destruction in Tibet itself.

The great translator of the Buddha's Perfection of Wisdom Sutras from Sanskrit into Tibetan, Rinchen Zangpo, visited Spiti Valley a little over a thousand years ago. His residence in the valley marks the awakening of the intellectual life of the Spiti people and the beginning of their known culture. The school was named in honor of him: Rinchen Zangpo Society for Spiti Development.

Foundation of Rinchen Zangpo Society

Rinchen Zangpo Society provides comprehensive education to children of Spiti and neighbouring areas with a special emphasis on passing on pride in Buddhist culture. While the school is co-ed, it recognizes the importance of educating girls and young women, since it views them as essential cornerstones of Spiti's future. The school is recognized by the Himachal Pradesh Education Board as both a primary and a middle school.

The Dalai Lama inaugurated the new school in 1996, giving it the name Munsel-ling. At that time, it was the first English-medium private school in Spiti. In 1999 the school took in its first boarders. Today approximately half the present school population of 400 lives on site at the school.

In spite of the school's efforts to promote the idea of girls education among parents, less than 30% of students in the care of the Rinchen Zangpo Society are girls. In many local families, girls and women are responsible for household tasks such as fetching water from the spring, rounding up the milking cow, cleaning the house or preparing food. In the process, school and homework become secondary to the need to survive.

But girls who are in the Rinchen Zangpo Societies education scheme have amply demonstrated their academic ability and the school sees educated women as the key to social development.

TRAS support for primary and secondary education

TRAS supports the primary and secondary education of children at Richen Zangpo Society through its sponsorship program. For an annual donation of $400 per child, TRAS members enable children at the school to purchase school uniforms, study materials such as pencils, erasers, paper, and text books. Furthermore, it enables them to pay their academic tuition, boarding fees and food.

Every August, Rinchen Zangpo Society celebrates its school with a festival, where all students participate in games, sport, songs, dance, quizzes and debate.

TRAS' recent projects with the Munsel Ling School include stocking the school library; providing computers and training for children and adults (when the infrequent electrical supply allows); the building of greenhouses against the hostels, in the hopes of providing fresh vegetables to improve the children's rather poor diet, and the building of a much-needed health care centre. Now that the school is doing well academically, the staff is turning to the important needs of health care and nutrition for the children. The new health care centre and its trained worker will be able to check up on all the children regularly, and to isolate any child with one of the many communicable illnesses which plague the crowded dormitories. It is not easy to keep children healthy in such an inhospitable climate, with a lack of water and of nutritious food.

In the summer of 2007, TRAS was able to partner with the Global Health Initiative of the University of British Columbia to do further work for Spiti. A team of medical and dental students from UBC worked at the school to set up the new health centre and do a complete survey of the health and dental needs of the 400 children. They also trained the health care worker to be able to carry on the primary health care for the children. The UBC students applied for funding to build a winter toilet block, in partnership with TRAS, which is currently under construction.