There's a Hole in My Bucket!

The drive from Dharamsala to Bir was a bumpy three and half hours. I’m seriously cursed for getting carsick so easily, but I managed to keep what was in my stomach in my stomach. I was traveling with three LTWA Science Section staff members, Sangey, Paldon and Karma. Poor Karma got so nauseas from the ride and the crazy humid super hot then super cold weather, we had to stop several times for him to throw up.

Bir is a tiny village town of Tibetans and Indians. The main market is a short cracked road of shops, half of which are always closed when I walk through town. But the people here are nice and the atmosphere is really mellow. Apparently Bir is world famous for paragliding, but it’s off-season and no one gliding now (pre-monsoon season) except for highly skilled experts. The surrounding area is beautiful. We’re at the foot of some lush, green mountains, with rice and wheat paddies dotted by villagers’ houses. All around the fields and on tops of people’s houses are Tibetan prayer flags. These flags are common in Dharamsala, but here they’re especially beautiful flapping in the wind amidst a lush mountainous landscape during a sunset.

The workshop is being held at a place called Deer Park Institute, a center for Buddhist Studies. Deer Park Institute was converted into a center for Buddhist Studies just a few years ago. Prior to that it was Dzongsar Monastery, where 400 monks practiced and lived. Then a Rinpoche (literally means “Precious One”aka a Dharma teacher) had the vision to convert the monastery into a place where one could study about all sects of Buddhism and some aspects of Hinduism. It’s run by a dynamic young guy name Preshant from Mumbai and Xhing Xi, a woman from Taiwan. The first day we arrived we met some of their resident scholars who are doing year-long internships in ecological waste management, Buddhism, Tibetan and Hindi language, and sustainable/organic farming methods. Despite being located in a tiny, remote village, these students are from all over. There’s a student from Canada, Laos, Cambodia, Spain and France.

I would have never thought such a progressive and proactively green center of study like this one would exist in India, let alone in a small village. The area has no civic infrastructure (including no landfills, etc) so the Institute had to find a way to deal with waste and trash. Nearly all of the village people and local community burn their trash, unknowingly releasing toxic chemicals and pollutants into the air. Deer Park set up a trash segregation system where they separate different kinds of paper products, recyclable plastics, and non-recyclable plastics. The pipes also cannot handle too much toilet paper so this has to be thrown away in wastebaskets and dealt with in another way. The biggest problem is tetra-packs like juice boxes and milk boxes, and the stuff that chip bags are made from. There’s no way to recycle those, and they still haven’t found a waste solution for those items. It’s really sad to see so much litter here, even in the mountain streams and fields. Preshant told me some people don’t know what to do with their trash so they throw it in the streams and rivers. But he said in the small Indian village nearby, there’s hardly any litter or garbage because the people there don’t consume packaged goods like chips or milk, but are entirely self-sufficient.


Ten North American professors flew in to teach Physics, Biology and Neurology to 40 monks, most of who traveled all the way from southern India to participate in the workshop. There’s even a female Physics professor who came that’s nearly 7 months pregnant! I’m helping the Library film the workshop sessions to produce DVDs that the monks can use for review of the materials, and for monks that didn’t attend the workshop. Since we’re in session all day, we also take our meals here at Deer Park. The food here is beautiful. Everything is prepared with organic or locally grown ingredients. The meals aren’t extravagant, but just wholesome, delicious and cooked with TLC. I already know that I’m really going to miss this place when I go back to D-Sala.

The other day I went with some friends to visit Dzongsar Monastery (what Deer Park used to be). They moved to a new facility that houses over 3,000 monks. It’s like a small college campus. The main temple there has a lot of beautiful paintings and imagery.

I’ve been so lucky to be able to spend a lot of time in beautiful mountain areas in different parts of the world, but nothing has been like the mountains here. The other day I went up to the roof of Deer Park’s main temple. It was nearing the end of the ‘golden hour’ and the sun was about to dip behind the mountains. I’ve never seen the air so clear, and the sky so blue and the mountains so green. And the breeze was cool against face, and from the roof I could see all the tops of people’s houses and their faded prayer flags blowing in the wind, and I thought to myself that this is like heaven on earth.


ps.. I'll add photos soon!!