Making Friends and Enjoying Community

Earlham College
Oct 2, 2019
2 min read

Welcome to the Blog! My name is Evan and today I’d like to write about a few elements of our daily life at Sarah College. As we wrap up our second to last week here at the Sarah Campus and start thinking about the upcoming pilgrimage trip and homestays, I think a lot of us are feeling nostalgic about leaving our friends, teachers, and routines. With all the exciting things coming in the next few weeks, I wanted to take a few moments in this post to talk a little more about the community we’ve enjoyed over the last month.

The Author and some students from the English class.

Students and Dogs on the Triund Pass

A big part of my daily routine at Sarah has been teaching English Class to the young monks every afternoon. As a Bonner Scholar, I’ve appreciated the program’s flexibility in giving me the time and resources to complete my service hours this semester. Each afternoon, we’ve practiced grammar, vocabulary, and conversation skills. The main goal of my time with my monks has been to help facilitate an environment that’s fun and supportive of learning, and to help the students cultivate a love for the language. With the help of some of the other program students, we’ve organizing games, exercises, and skits. I’m especially grateful to the monks for their patience with me as a teacher and for their enthusiasm to learn and have fun.

I’ve also really enjoyed the excursions on the weekends that the Sarah faculty have organized for us and our Tibetan roommates. We particularly enjoyed our day trek to the Triund pass last weekend. The trek began in Dharamkot around 6:45 and took us a little over 3 hours to reach the top. Throughout the hike, we ran into a herd of grazing sheep and we were accompanied the entire trip by a group of 2 or 3 friendly dogs who enthusiastically hiked with us and ate some of our food at the top. After eating lunch on the pass, Sam, Berto, Truman, and one of the monks who had joined us hiked another hour and a half to the ‘snowline’ above the pass where we saw giant vultures and beautiful views of the glaciers.

Group Photo at Triund

The Author and Leo the Dog take a nap after lunch on the Triund Pass.

To wrap up the week, on Friday night with the help of the cooks we had a momo making party with our roommates. Momos, a Tibetan steamed dumpling has been a main food group for us during our time here, so we really enjoyed learning the process. The best part was eating them. I made it as far as 12 momos while my roommate Lhagyal beat me, downing over 15. We also got to do some experimenting by putting banana, peanut butter, and Nutella inside which passed my taste test with flying colors.